Samizdata

Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night’s episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the “Colossus” computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his “difference engine”. Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage’s machine, and it worked.

But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.

I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.

For many years now, I’ve been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage’s restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … “it worked”, which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.

So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.

There’s a terrific Steyn piece to be read here. I’m not sure if I could have read it sooner, without purchasing the Atlantic Monthly in paper form but I am delighted to have read it now.

Final two paragraphs:

Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan’s movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

Well I surely hope that that last rhetorical non-question is correct, and anyway, even if it isn’t, merely agreeing with posterity is not the point. The point is being morally right now, and if posterity is wrong, so much the worse for posterity. That aside, this is the kind of piece that makes me want Mark Steyn to carry on carrying on for just as long as he can manage it. Morally he says all the right things here, and he is obviously so well informed about the artistic issues that no semi-philistine from Hollywood would dare to play the philistine card. Of such pieces are ideological victories fashioned. For as long as there are anti-anti-communists in business, then for so long should they be lambasted until anyone they might influence gets the point.

I am very proud of my little contribution to the anti-anti-anti-communist genre, a piece called Why I Support The Contras. My one regret about this is that it is available in pdf form only, as yet. (I will correct this Real Soon Now.) And now, like Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting, I say, never forget what Communism did and what its disgustingly self-righteous stooges in the West are still retrospectively fronting for.

This (it seems I can read at least quite a lot of Atlantic Monthly on line) makes the same point.