I’m a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad foreign policy blogger
Your humble blogger is fully aware that everyone and their mother has been blogging and writing about the big Obama speech from yesterday. Why, you might ask, have I been silent? [I might, I might indeed!–ed.] It’s a combination of four things: Like Mark Lynch, I want to wait and see what the longer-term effects are ...
Your humble blogger is fully aware that everyone and their mother has been blogging and writing about the big Obama speech from yesterday. Why, you might ask, have I been silent? [I might, I might indeed!--ed.]
Your humble blogger is fully aware that everyone and their mother has been blogging and writing about the big Obama speech from yesterday. Why, you might ask, have I been silent? [I might, I might indeed!–ed.]
It’s a combination of four things:
- Like Mark Lynch, I want to wait and see what the longer-term effects are — if any. By longer term, we’re talking past the six-hour window that bloggers would consider as long-term.
- There are plenty of FP bloggers who can write about this to any ideological flavor. So I’m free-riding off of them rather than write about a subject on which writing persuades no one and brings nothing but loopiness to the comments section.
- [He’s waaaay behind on some other writing assignments!!–ed.] You weren’t supposed to say that out loud.
- Superficial cultural gadfly that I am, the thing that caught my attention this AM was not the reax to the Obama speech, but A.O. Scott’s devastating evisceration of Sam Mendes’ new movie Away We Go (though I do grant that the trailer looks amusing). In this paragraph, Scott articulates for me the response I always have to Mendes’ work:
To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.
Clearly, Sam Mendes is not the film equivalent of de Tocqueville. This, of course, leads to a vital film question: who is the cinematic equivalent of Alexis de Tocqueville?
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
More from Foreign Policy
Saudi-Iranian Détente Is a Wake-Up Call for America
The peace plan is a big deal—and it’s no accident that China brokered it.
The U.S.-Israel Relationship No Longer Makes Sense
If Israel and its supporters want the country to continue receiving U.S. largesse, they will need to come up with a new narrative.
Putin Is Trapped in the Sunk-Cost Fallacy of War
Moscow is grasping for meaning in a meaningless invasion.
How China’s Saudi-Iran Deal Can Serve U.S. Interests
And why there’s less to Beijing’s diplomatic breakthrough than meets the eye.
Sign up for Morning Brief
Foreign Policy’s flagship daily newsletter with what’s coming up around the world today. Delivered weekdays.
By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.
