Dave Shiflett: Home

20th Century Pox: War, Race Hatred, Mass Slaughter

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Historian Niall Ferguson compares the 20th Century’s unrivalled bloodletting to the mayhem depicted in H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” with one difference: Humans played the part of marauding Martian invaders.
Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard, counts the bodies, and suggests causes, in “The War of the World,” which airs on PBS starting June 30 at 10 p.m. New York time.
The three-part series, which opens with footage of a flamethrower doing its signature work, deeply challenges the notion that we’re an advanced species, save at the art of extermination.
Why was the century so bloody?
Ferguson argues that three factors converged to create a “hundred-year global war”: economic volatility, the breakdown of formerly harmonious multi-ethnic societies in places like Yugoslavia and Poland, and the unraveling of old empires, which unleashed a wave of revolutions and similar power gropes.
Racial animosity also reached new levels of virulence, Ferguson says. Hate recognized no borders. The Russian press denounced the Japanese as “jaundiced monkeys” in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese war; the Japanese repaid the compliment by sending most of the Baltic fleet to the bottom of the sea in 1905.
The Japanese held the Chinese in similar regard, starting a war in 1937 that Ferguson says was the real outbreak of World War II. Then there was Hitler and company: Ferguson argues that the Holocaust, while not the first of the century’s genocides, was unique because it was carried out by one of the most sophisticated and highly educated societies in history.
Hitler, he adds, considered Americans a “decadent” and “racially mongrel people.” Whatever our racial credentials, we were very good at building weapons, which we gladly lent to Joseph Stalin, another ferocious race-baiter.
Viewers who believe Stalin has too long walked in Hitler’s murderous shadow will find a kindred spirit in Ferguson, who closely examines Stalin’s bloody policies, many of which, he argues, were “racial persecution disguised as class warfare.” Stalin, he says, was “deeply suspicious” of all non-Russians, and Stalin’s suspicion was often a death sentence.
In an arresting segment, Ferguson peruses the archives of the Soviet Gulag – row upon row of brown-covered books containing the names and pictures of victims. He finds it “rather haunting to look at these faces” and reads the entry of a woman who got ten years in the camps for simply criticizing the government.
Ferguson’s views on the Allies’ victory in World War 11, featured in the second installment (July 7), will likely be the most controversial. Ferguson argues that 1943-45 was the “cataclysmic crux” of the “war of the world,” during which the Allies adopted some of the same strategies as the Axis powers.
American troops often killed Japanese soldiers attempting to surrender, he says, partially explaining why some fought to the death. Allied bombers also targeted civilian populations, killing 35,000-50,000 in Hamburg, at least 35,000 in Dresden, followed by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While Ferguson makes a distinction between gassing innocent civilians and attacking cities in nations that unleashed war, he says the effects were frightfully similar, and calls the Allied effort a “tarnished victory.”
While the world wars featured massive killing grounds – Ferguson says the pivotal battle of Kursk (1943) between Germany and the Soviets took place on a battlefield “the size of Wales”— many deaths occurred in more remote places and circumstances. The “age of genocide” kicked off, he says, with the 1915 Turkish slaughter of up to 1.5 Armenians, many of whom were driven into the desert to perish. Within Russia, millions died from either execution or starvation policies.
All told, the dogs of war have been insatiable and Ferguson warns they’re hardly sleeping.
The series concludes July 14 with a look at the last half of the 20th century, which wasn’t so great an improvement over the first. With some 20 million deaths in conflicts including proxy wars between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it’s safe to say the Age of Aquarius was mostly a theatrical phenomenon.
Meantime, a new Eastern power is rising – China – whose expansive designs may cause as much mayhem as Japan’s imperial excesses, Ferguson warns. The Middle East, he adds, could unleash a conflict as staggering as “anything we saw in the 20th Century.”
One comes away thinking a backyard bomb shelter may be a wise investment after all.

Not so secret, this diary reminds why many of us don't take up sex professionally.

By Dave Shiflett
Most people like sex but probably wouldn’t want to do it professionally.
“Secret Diary of A Call Girl,” which debuts on Showtime June 16 at 10:30 p.m. New York time, reminds us why.
Inspired by the books/blog of a hooker named Belle, the London-based series was a hit in the UK and is slated for eight episodes this year.
It’s not likely to make anyone forget “Sex And The City,” though it has a few charms.
Belle, played by Billie Piper, is a plain-spoken professional. “The first thing you should know about me is that I’m a whore,” she says early on, though not the type who works the stalls at the bus station.
“I’m very high class,” she discloses while sitting on the john, which isn’t the first john she’ll be sitting on during the opener.
Belle’s no skank, to be sure. She has a pretty face, a fairly low-riding set of customer incentives and nice buns she rents out for lots of dough.
“I charge by the hour. I charge a lot,” though she doesn’t disclose her fee. She adds that she’s no stereotypical streetwalker with abuse and/or addiction in her past. Instead, she simply has two loves -- sex and money -- though not in that order.
One of her iron rules of commerce is that she gets paid up front.
Belle discloses a few other tricks of the trade: stay in control, practice good hygiene, and wear men’s deodorant. A hooker doesn’t want to send a customer home smelling like a dame, she explains.
The half-hour show features some slightly steamy sex, if you can get past her sometimes unimpressive partners. Though she hands them a toothbrush and a towel before encounters they don’t always clean up so well.
Her first client, for instance, is a somewhat sallow fellow with long sideburns and minimal muscle tone. That he and attractive Belle are in the same room, much less bed, is a stirring reminder of money’s power to bring people together.
She takes him where he wants to go, leaving him nearly in need of a session with a defibrillator. He’s clearly stricken and returns before the curtain drops.
Belle also takes on a younger, more sensitive john whose initial encounter is somewhat limp, though he eventually comes around. One notices that Belle can go from cold to hot in the flick of a switch – or, more precisely, as soon as she has cash in hand. She moans and shrieks like she really means it, which probably comes in handy at tip time.
On the business and administrative end of things, Belle has an “agent” named Stephanie (Cherie Lunghi), who serves as madam to several other girls. She’s strictly business and somewhat grasping; perhaps she attended Wharton. At a restaurant meeting Belle tells her she’d like to order some food but assumes Stephanie will take a sizable cut of the entre. And no doubt leave Belle the bone.
Despite her professional pride Belle is not keen on her family learning what she really does for a living. To them she is known as Hannah and works as a legal secretary. Future episodes take up this additional source of friction in her life.
Meantime, this is a fairly sterile presentation of the sex trade without much feeling for its grittier aspects, such as dealing with mean drunks, massively fat people, mysterious rashes and perhaps the occasional discovery of a well-fed tick.
Yet the opener does end with an amusing example of the breadth of desire. The sallow fellow returns for an equestrian adventure. He dons a saddle while Belle drives, crop in hand, reminding us that humans are rarely more humorous than when amorous.

A little golfing lore on the eve of the U.S. Open

(Bloomberg) -- Non-golfers (ahem) are likely to be clueless as to why the 1960 U.S. Open holds a sacred place in the hearts of the duffer faithful.

HBO explains it all in ``Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open,'' which airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. New York time, the eve of the 108th U.S. Open.

Even those who prefer the 19th hole to the previous 18 will find this an hour pleasantly spent. The 1960 championship, after all, featured golf's holy trinity -- Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus -- and memories of the event continue to electrify those who love the game.

Sportswriter Dan Jenkins says the matchup was ``too big, too wildly exciting, too crazily suspenseful, too suffocatingly dramatic,'' adding that ``in the span of just 18 holes, we witnessed the arrival of Nicklaus, the coronation of Palmer and the end of Hogan.''

Other than being great golfers, the three titans had little in common.

Only Nicklaus was from a country club background. His father ran a string of drug stores in Columbus, Ohio and young Jack was something of a prodigy, shooting a 51 his first time around nine holes (at age 10) and winning the Ohio Open at 16.

He was also a highly talented beer drinker, as he reveals in an interview.

All the Beer in Columbus

``I tried to drink all the beer they made in Columbus, Ohio,'' he says, an exertion that saddled him with an impressive gut.

Palmer had a gentrified connection of a different sort. His father was groundskeeper at the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvania. Arnie was ``taught as a young boy that I was not a member of the club,'' which meant that instead of swimming at the pool he cooled off in a nearby creek, sharing those rustic facilities ``with the snakes.''

Hogan, meantime, rose from ``the dirt,'' as he called his hardscrabble origins in Dublin, Texas. His story is by far the most tragic of the three.

His father committed suicide when Hogan was 6; according to a newspaper account, he shot himself as young Ben looked on. Hogan got into golf on the ground floor, caddying for 65 cents per 18 holes and sometimes, the film says, sleeping in sand traps when he didn't want to make the long walk home.

Comeback Kid

He also showed an affinity for the game and a tenacity that saw him through hard times, including a 1949 collision with a bus that nearly killed him. His comeback was the stuff of legend and a Hollywood film: ``Follow the Sun'' (1951) starred Glenn Ford as the heroic Hogan.

Hogan, who died in 1997, was definitely the prickliest of the three.

``He was never friendly to me,'' Palmer recalls. ``It didn't mean that I didn't appreciate the fact that he was one of the great guys, great players of all time. But as my father said to me, there's no reason why you can't be good and be nice.''

The show builds slowly to the championship at Cherry Hills County Club, outside Denver. Hogan was the sentimental favorite but an initial spree of poor putting made some wonder if he'd even make the cut.

Indeed, there was ferocious hacking all around, with Nicklaus and Palmer spending significant time in Bogeyville. Yet Palmer staged one of the most amazing comebacks in golf history, with six birdies on seven holes.

Hogan hit the wall on the 17th hole of the final round, where his ball landed in a water hazard. We watch the aging great take off one shoe and sock and blasting the aqua-ball onto the green, where he missed his putt. He gruffly recalled in a later interview that hardly a month went by when memories of the 17th didn't ``cut my guts out.''

The future was brighter for Nicklaus and Palmer, with Arnie buying the Latrobe Country Club in 1971, having come a long way from bathing with the snakes.