I wonder how George Crile, author of Charlie Wilson’s War, would have liked the Tom Hanks’ version. Sadly, George died about a year ago from cancer and didn’t live to see his book brought to the screen, even though it was already in production. The review in today’s New York Times was flattering and I suppose looking at it as a movie alone and not a piece of accurate history is just fine. However, if one prefers facts over entertainment, I’d suggest reading the book
Charlie Wilson’s War purports to be the true story of a hard-partying U.S. congressman from Texas who engineered the defeat of the Soviet Union by the Afghan Mujahiddin. Now there are true stories, and there are true-ish stories. It is a given that, in creating a film narrative, sometimes the truth gets a little bent, but it’s against the rules to change facts that change the outcome of history. When telling the story of Antony and Cleopatra, they gotta die at the end, n’est pas. It’s inappropriate, for example, to tell the story of World War II and pretend that, because the United States might have given a box of guns to the French Underground, there was no Holocaust. That’s a pretty good analogy for what’s been done in Charlie Wilson’s War.
Consider this tangled web:
In the latter half of the movie, there is one big lie and one item of anti-Afghan propaganda. The lie is that U.S. support to the mujahiddin went only to the faction led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan leader who was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001. I spoke with Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Texas, in 2002, at which time he called Massoud “a Russian collaborator.” I find it disingenuous that Wilson and his Hollywood biographers now want to throw their arms around him. (Note: George Crile’s book does not make this false claim.) Moreover, if this movie succeeds in convincing Americans that the U.S. support went to Ahmad Shah Massoud alone, it will have effectively let the CIA and Wilson off the hook for their contribution to the circumstances leading up to 9/11. During the 1980s, Wilson engineered the appropriation of approximately $3.5 billion to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. According to Milt Bearden, CIA chief of station to Pakistan, Massoud received less than 1 percent of it.
That assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud was the green light for what is now commonly referred to as 9/11. It can be rather tricky to navigate the happenings while trying to sort out the who, what, and where, never minding the “why,” but try and read the entire article to get a clearer understanding just how little we know about what goes on behind closed doors—that is if you can pull yourself away from the drama of the pregnancy “everyone” is talking about.
In schools and shopping malls and around the dining room table, the subject of teenage pregnancy and sex was suddenly and uncomfortably in the air as mothers and daughters and fathers, too, talked about — or tried not to talk about — the pregnancy of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, who plays the perfect, well-liked and, it is understood, virginal teenage girl on “Zoey 101” on Nickelodeon.
High school girls here wondered aloud on Thursday why no one was talking about contraception. Parents across the country, on the other hand, commiserated over the Internet about how, thanks to Ms. Spears, they were facing a conversation with their 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds about sex.
The New York Times thought this story merited ink, yet there was not one word about the responsibility of the boy who got Spears pregnant. Maybe it will be a good lesson for parents to talk to their teenagers—both male and female—about safe sex, but using Jamie Lynn Spears as an example about why being so young to have a baby is unhealthy will quite likely not work. Even though she’s quite likely not emotionally or mentally prepared to be a mother, Spears is going to have much more help and resources to care for this baby than most teenage girls who are caught in this situation. What a pattern and how sad that Jamie Lynn’s sister, Britney, has so severely messed up as a young mother and it looks like Jamie Lynn is following in those steps. What is almost amusing is that someone thought that the Spear girls’ mother was qualified to write a book about parenting.
Lynne Spears’ book about parenting has been delayed indefinitely, her publisher said Wednesday. Lindsey Nobles, a spokeswoman for Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., said Wednesday that the memoir by the mother of Britney Spears was put on hold last week. She declined to comment on whether the delay was connected to the revelation that Spears’ 16-year-old daughter, Jamie Lynn, is pregnant.
“I can tell you that we are standing behind Lynne and supporting her decision to be with her family at this time,” Nobles told The Associated Press. “Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World” was initially scheduled for release May 11, Mother’s Day. Spears, the mother of three children with ex-husband Jamie Spears, had been working with a Michigan-based freelancer since March on the memoir chronicling Spears’ experiences raising a family in the public eye.
Thomas Nelson is a Christian publisher and they were actually paying Lynne Spears’ to “write” about being a mom to these celebrities. Even without the news of her 16-year-old daughter’s pregnancy, that is a joke. Now they are back-pedaling.
Finally, is it really a surprise what this study discovered?
Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.
Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.
The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.
Then, as I read further I was comforted to discover that I wasn’t the only one who thought the study was redundant.
Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous efforts to compare institutional care and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed adoptions from countries that still allow them.
Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, but if this study does have that outcome, then I’ll back off in my criticism.
And while the beat goes on, those are just some of the news stories being reported.