But even the surliest, most devoted Mitchum fans understand something fundamental: that he, alone among his peers, lived in shadow. Mitchum made it his life’s work to remind us of the world’s darkness. From his great ’40s noir turns in"Out of the Past" and “The Big Steal,” through ’50s rabble-rousing roles like ‘Thunder Road" and"River of No Return," right up to gritty ’70s dramas like “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” and “Farewell, My Lovely,” Mitehum captured shades of cynicism, disillusionment and reserve that have yet to be matched. Even off-screen, he deliberately east himself as the Hollywood outsider. In 1948, when he landed in jail on a marijuana bust, he met the press with his warped sense of perspective intact. “I’m happy here,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a man in my tank who’s as coldblooded as some of the people in Hollywood.” He swore he hated interviews, but he never came when they made “Undercurrent” in 1946. “I’m tired of playing with people who have nothing to offer.”
Of course, Mitehum had something priceless to offer: a refusal to take himself seriously, and the willingness to challenge everyone who did. He learned it early on. Born in Bridgeport, Conn., the oldest of four kids, he hit the road as a teenager, jumping freight trains, working on a chain gang and holding down an assortment of jobs, from aircraft worker to shoe salesman. He claimed to have been a prizefighter, with 27 professional bouts. (In 1962 a reporter decided to check up on him. “He may have had 27 fights,” said Mitchum’s mother, “but they weren’t professional.”) In 1940 he married his sweetheart, Dorothy Spence; they remained together for life. Right until the end, Mitehum was his own greatest disparager. “He’d arrive on the set,” recalls Jarmusch, who directed Mitehum in the 1996 surrealist Western “Dead Man,” “and people would say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Mitchum, how are you?’ ‘Terrible.’ The next person would say, ‘How are you doing?’ “Worse!’ He was such a character.” Mitchurn understood a great secret. If you can remind people what it means to feel bad, you can help them feel very, very good.
title: “Out Of The Shadows” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Eulalia Bigelow”
In Imperial China, emperors needed the Mandate of Heaven to legitimize their rule. In Jiang’s case, heaven is reserving judgment. He has appointed enough top generals and made enough important friends to cement his position in normal political terms. But the Jiang era does not begin in normal times. He must take the place of the revolutionary leaders who had stamped China with their iron will for the last half century. He must preside over a feudal nation that has thrown itself open to the modern world more energetically–and disruptively–in the last 20 years than in the previous 200. He must repair a dynamo of prosperity that has generated huge pockets of poverty, displaced workers and corruption. And Jiang must do all this not as a hero of the revolution but as a product of Mao’s destructive legacy–a follower whose background taught only ““how to take orders from above,’’ as a Beijing intellectual puts it.
Still, Jiang’s background provided the seed of his power. As an engineering graduate in Shanghai, he worked at a soap factory and an auto plant, among other gritty jobs. That proletarian rEsumE nonetheless gave Jiang something most of his revolutionary elders lacked: a higher education. It also made him part of the Shanghai crowd, a network spreading from China’s biggest, brawniest and most cosmopolitan city–the nation’s self-styled ““dragon head.’’ Jiang may not have been fired by revolution, but Mao could not have kept up with his English aphorisms (““To be or not to be, that is the question,’’ he once blurted out to Secretary of State Warren Christopher) or his dialogue on computer technology with IBM chairman Louis Gerstner Jr.
As mayor of Shanghai, his first big political job, Jiang became known for calming storms. While Beijing was losing control of its Tiananmen protesters in 1989, he talked Shanghai students into going home peacefully. At his alma mater, Jiaotong University, he spotted a wall poster quoting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and surprised students by reciting passages in English. Then he lectured them that they were misreading Lincoln’s call for a ““new birth of freedom.’’
Jiang’s deft crisis management–holding the ideological line, yet dispersing protesters peacefully–caught Deng’s eye and helped catapult the Shanghai outsider into the Beijing leadership in 1989. Once in power, Jiang glossed over his differences with Deng, but never quite hid them. Deng had turned away from Mao’s brutal communal ideals and promoted the individual entrepreneurship of Shenzhen, the boomtown of tacky high-rises and cheap factories that sprang up along the border with Hong Kong at Deng’s encouragement. Jiang’s style is simply not so dramatic. If he has an ideal to compare to Mao’s and Deng’s, says a Beijing philosophy professor, ““it’s to bring them both together–and what’s so visionary about that?’’
Jiang prefers law and order to grand social designs. He has launched major crackdowns on crime and dissent, tried to patch up China’s faltering state industries and generally has set about rationalizing the chaos left behind by the revolutionary giants. While Deng loved go-go Shenzhen, Jiang’s favorite city is squeaky-clean Zhangjiagang–where strict, Singapore-style rules prohibit smoking and spitting in public and people are encouraged to read the ““Civilized Citizen’s Study Book.’’ While Deng decreed that ““to get rich is glorious,’’ Jiang evokes a ““spiritual civilization’’ upholding high moral standards and national pride. His official mood makers have banned smutty romance novels and filled the media with the new puritanical line. The action in China already has shifted under Jiang. For years, the story was the phenomenal growth of export industries in the south–churning out computers and Cabbage Patch dolls, turning village leaders into tycoons. Now Jiang has put the emphasis on Shanghai, Harbin and other big industrial cities of the Yangtze River Valley and the north, where the failures of state enterprises and rising unemployment represent disasters in the making.
A few years ago economic policymakers spent their time drawing up plans for more and more free-enterprise zones along the coast. Now Jiang has them considering the plight of the rural poor. His regime has endorsed huge new subsidies to the remoter parts of China with the goal of building up roads and communications, including Internet access. In theory, at least, Jiang plans nothing less than a Chinese New Deal aimed at narrowing the income gap between the coastal cities and the provinces, thus heading off peasant uprisings or a massive rural migration to the cities.
If Jiang can amass the authority needed to bring this off, it will be thanks to his tactical skills. From the start, his priority was to court the People’s Liberation Army, where he has no natural constituency. That still does not make the army an easy partner for an apparatchik like Jiang. After Taiwan spurned Jiang’s proposal for reconciliation in 1995, party elders and the generals blasted him as weak and by some accounts ordered him to make a self-criticism. But the generals fared no better when their subsequent missile exercises off the coast of the ““renegade province’’ attracted two U.S. aircraft carriers and international condemnation. Now Jiang’s priorities seem to be leading foreign policy once more. Beijing has been negotiating new trade links with Taiwan, organizing summits with Washington and otherwise following Deng’s line of keeping the barbarians calm while China concentrates on its own development. ““Jiang is again the top decision maker,’’ says a Beijing policy adviser.
Jiang’s civilian rivals will play their hands more studiously. The head of the national Parliament, Qiao Shi, is a key architect of the legal reforms that China needs to attract more substantial foreign investments. The economic boss, Zhu Rongji, has defied Western pessimists by taming inflation and laying the foundations of a sound central-banking system. Even Li Peng, who is largely blamed for the Tiananmen crackdown, reportedly expects another senior position when his term as prime minister ends next year. Jiang’s advantage is that like him, all of his conceivable rivals lack revolutionary pedigrees and strong ties to the military. ““He has the good fortune of not being opposed by people like Deng Xiaoping,’’ says Roderick MacFarquhar of Harvard University. To keep his opponents in the dark, all Jiang has to do is keep them in his shadow–and make sure that his shadow keeps getting bigger.
title: “Out Of The Shadows” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-23” author: “Timothy Snyder”
The machinery of European institutions still creaks slowly, though, and Prodi may have to wait until September before taking up his post. In the meantime, Jacques Santer, who resigned along with the entire Commission following accusations of mismanagement and fraud, may remain on the job.
This marks the second time in one year that the former P.M. has been credited with polishing his country’s international image. It was Prodi who succeeded in pulling together Italy’s budgets and books to qualify it, just barely, for EMU. Italy’s business community and labor unions called Prodi’s accession a victory for the nation; he’ll be only the second Italian to head the Commission since it was founded in 1957. One Roman pizzeria even offered a special “blue” pizza to symbolize the EC–sausage not included.
TROUBLEIn Contempt
For Bill Clinton, the repercussions from the Monica Lewinsky scandal are far from over. Legal sources in Arkansas say Judge Susan Webber Wright, who presided over the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, may soon hold the president in civil contempt for providing misleading testimony about his relationship with Lewinsky. The sources say the judge is waiting for a verdict in the contempt trial against Whitewater figure Susan McDougal because Wright doesn’t want to influence the outcome of that case. If Clinton is cited for contempt, he could be fined or lose his law license.
UNITED STATESA Setback for Assisted Suicide
Jack Kevorkian, America’s infamous suicide doctor, claims he has sent more than 130 sick patients to their graves since 1990. Thomas Youk, a Michigan man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, may have been one of Kevorkian’s last. Convicted of second-degree murder last week, the 70-year-old retired pathologist could face life in prison.
Last fall Kevorkian videotaped his fatal injection of Youk and sent the tape to the popular evening news program “60 Minutes,” which aired it. During the November episode, Kevorkian taunted prosecutors. They responded with charges of murder.
Kevorkian will be sentenced April 14, and prosecutor John Skrzynski expects what the law prescribes: 10 to 25 years. Kevorkian’s lawyers will argue for leniency. “This is not a typical murder,” lead attorney David Gorosh told NEWSWEEK. Lawyers are also preparing two sets of appeals: one on technical issues from this trial, and the other on broader constitutional grounds.
THE MINDPhysical Thoughts
It has long been a dream of brain researchers to harness the power of the mind to move matter. Now a team of scientists at Germany’s University of Tubingen have found a way to teach paralyzed patients to communicate through sheer thought. Using the aptly named “thought translation device,” patients amplify and dampen their brain waves in a way that allows them to select letters on a video screen and spell out messages. “For the first time,” says Niels Birbaumer, a Tubingen neurobiologist, “we have shown that it is possible to communicate with nothing but one’s own brain” (and, to be fair, a pile of electronics), “and to escape, at least verbally, the locked-in state.”
Thoughts, intentions and memories are not mere ephemera with no physicality. They are, instead, electrical signals that are easily picked up by an electroencephalograph (EEG). The Tubingen team place one electrode behind a patient’s ear and one on the scalp. The electrodes detect brain waves. Wires carry the electrical signals to an EEG, which plucks out a single type of wave from a sea of noise. It takes hundreds of hours of practice, but after painstaking training patients learn to modulate this wave: when they hear an audio tone, they concentrate on changing the strength of this brain wave through a technique that neuroscientist Edward Taub of the University of Alabama at Birmingham calls passive attention. Although he can’t describe precisely how the patients do it, “somehow they learn to put their [brain waves] under voluntary control.” Once they do, they’re ready to spell, by choosing letters from those displayed on a video screen.
Birbaumer is trying to speed up the system, now about two characters per minute. But the scientists have dreams beyond the ABCs. “If someone can learn to control the amplitude [of his brain wave],” says Taub, “that response can operate any aspect of the environment a programmer can hook up.” In other words, the electronics can be wired so that the brain wave controls light switches or a wheelchair. Even more visionary is the possibility of going wireless. If the electronics are sensitive enough, they might be able to grab brain waves out of the air. And then thinking really will make it so.
RELIGIONA Rite of Passage
Last weekend, 2 million Muslims completed the annual hajj, or pilgrimage, to the holy sites in and around Mecca, Saudi Arabia. A numerical look at their journey:
100
Estimated number of countries sending pilgrims
2,000
Estimated number of flights needed to transport pilgrims to and from Jedda
30,000
Number of fiber-glass tents, equipped with sprinklers and alarms, used to house pilgrims in Mina
450,000
Number of sacrificed sheep, camels and cows that will be distributed to the poor as meat
4,000,000
Number of containers of ritual water distributed at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina
4,500,000
Cost in dollars of the black silk kiswah (covering) for Islam’s most sacred shrine, the Kabah. A new one is hand-embroidered in Egypt each year and placed on the Kabah at the end of the hajj.
MUSICTokyo Is Talking…
About rice dumplings. Specifically, about “The Rice Dumpling Brothers Trio,” a children’s song that’s expected to break the record for best-selling CD in Japan. The song debuted in January on a kids’ TV program but quickly caught on with teens, as well as with adults who have complained that recent hits are too complicated for karaoke. Released in early March, the CD has already sold more than 3.5 million copies. Toymakers are laying plans for spinoff lunch boxes, key chains and plush dumplings. The tune is expected to beat out the current record holder for best-selling single: the 1975 kiddie song, “Oyoge! Taiyakikun,” or “Swim! Fish-Shaped Pancake.”
TRIALMicrosoft: Virtual Negotiations
The Microsoft trial took its first friendly turn last week when the software giant made a settlement offer to resolve its venomous clash with the government. The judge had instructed the two sides to explore settlement terms during the current hiatus in the trial. So Microsoft offered to loosen restrictive contracts on its partners, but unimpressed trustbusters dismissed the offer as vaporware.
Antitrust chief Joel Klein insists he’s open to an agreement. So does Microsoft, and the two sides will actually talk terms this week. Trial observers aren’t hopeful about a resolution. But the two sides may have extra time to work it out. The judge will likely delay the antitrust trial until May, when he’ll probably finish hearing a drug and homicide trial that only just started.
title: “Out Of The Shadows” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Eddie Ritter”
Wells was a futurist, but he got it all wrong on immigration. Today, facing global competition for labor talent and dwindling populations, the governments of Europe are increasingly willing to envision their future society as something more like an American ethnic mix, less a European pure breed. Across the European Union, countries are trying to tighten up on illegal immigrants, while welcoming immigrant talent most useful to their economies. The message: bring us your scientists, your techies, your engineers yearning to work. Last month the European Union announced plans for a more liberal residence visa that would make it easier for foreigners to live and work in its 15 member states. Last week in Vienna, Antonio Vitorino, the European Union’s commissioner for justice and internal affairs, declared the EU “a region of immigration.”
The transatlantic divide on immigration is narrowing. Though often honored in the breach, the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants has never been stronger. George W. Bush is currently considering giving legal status to 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants, in a deal with Mexico likely to be done this fall. Attitudes are changing even among those once most fearful of Mexicans “stealing jobs.” The biggest American union organization, the AFL-CIO, has dropped its opposition to new immigration and is now campaigning to organize these arrivals instead. Even more startling, labor unions in Germany are coming to much the same conclusion, publicly acknowledging that their nation needs immigrants to avert future labor shortages. The United States still attracts about 20 percent of all immigrants, but Europe (now at 19 percent) is catching up.
In truth, Europe has shored up waves of migration for hundreds of years. France made up the loss of a generation of men on World War I battlefields by importing Eastern Europeans, Spaniards and Italians. But modern nationalism has been very unfriendly toward foreigners, particularly if they have dark skin. What’s happening now is a new round of soul-searching, inspired by entirely practical considerations: economic necessity coupled with the fact that most migration now comes from Africa and Asia. Above all, Europe is rethinking its postwar tradition of providing a haven for political refugees, but shunning “economic immigrants” as a criminally trespassing class. “There have been no actual governmental policies to capture the dynamism of immigrants in Europe,” says Demitrious Papademetriou, of the International Migration Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The governments themselves get a D–at best.”
Europe began to rethink its attitudes in the late 1990s, motivated in part by a competitive threat from the United States. The United States was growing rapidly with both low inflation and low unemployment, a constellation of positive signs previously thought impossible. One explanation, economists now agree, is that a historic influx of immigrants was fueling growth while lowering upward pressure on wages. And Europe was falling behind. Praising the “clear advantages of the United States’ approach to immigration,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder last year gave in to industry demands by announcing the issue of 20,000 five-year visas for information-technology workers.
It was a first halting step. To an extent, the major European nations are employing immigrants to better effect, as the following stories in this section show, but often more by accident than design. In Britain, the rise of free-market ideology has allowed a new class of Indian entrepreneurs to thrive, even as immigration policies grew more restrictive. In Italy, immigrants have thrived in a robust black-market economy, despite the fact that they are not always officially welcome. France was first to declare itself a “welcoming land” for immigrants in the 1920s, but only to the extent that they become truly “French.”
Nowhere is the debate over immigration and national identity hotter than in Germany. Until last year German nationality law was based on the principle of jus sanguinis, or the law of blood, meaning that citizenship would be granted to, say, a Russian-speaking ethnic German from Kazakhstan, but not to the German-born children of Turkish guest workers. Last year Germany relaxed these rules, allowing the children of immigrants to become citizens, and other immigrants the right to vote.
The response was a shock. Doubting their welcome in Germany, far fewer Turks are taking up citizenship than expected. Polls show that most ordinary Germans say there are already “too many foreigners” in the country. And the Germans still can’t bring themselves to call new citizens “German.” Instead, politicians and the press resort to tortured expressions like “Turkish co-citizens,” or “Turks with German citizenship.”
Perhaps the best test of a society’s attitude toward immigrants is the way it treats those at the bottom: the illegals. They may have to swim the Rio Grande, but illegals are far more free to live and work without hassle in the United States than in Europe. States and cities often tacitly recognize the benefit of illegal labor, and tolerate or encourage illegals to find work, file taxes, get driver’s licenses, take out mortgages or health insurance and attend school. The Internal Revenue Service is forbidden by law from turning in illegal-immigrant taxpayers, a clear sign that the United States would rather employ than hunt illegals.
The life of an illegal is much more difficult in Europe. Though a recent EU report showed that 20 percent of the GDP of its 15 members was generated by illegal workers, they still tend to live underground. Illegals in Britain, for example, avoid banks and the national health services, and have to find housing that doesn’t require a written contract, says Praxis, a refugee organization in London. “It is a life,” says one refugee who refuses to give his name, “that is kept hidden.”
Now, in some European countries, illegals are starting to come up from underground. This May the Greek government responded to a massive union strike by extending a broad invitation to illegal migrant workers. By early June, city halls across the country were encouraging illegals to become legal by applying for new residence permits. “There is no need to be illegal… Stay legally. It’s good for everyone,” reads the sign at the city hall in an Athens suburb. Tellingly, however, the new rules made it easier to get residence permits, but more difficult to obtain citizenship. Costas Argaliotis of the Athens-based Network for Social Support to Immigrants and Refugees says that it “remains to be seen” whether permit holders will be truly accepted in Greek society.
At the heart of the immigration debate lies the same question of identity that animates the European Union’s tussle over enlarging to include nations like Romania or Turkey: “What makes a European?” A decade from now, will a European be merely anyone who fills a quota for a skill in short supply? The answers may not emerge from debate but from facts on the ground. Even the looming threat of global recession won’t change the longer-term threat: Europe is not producing enough children to pay the pensions of its aging population, which may make it hopelessly impractical to continue discouraging young immigrants. “Immigration is neither a problem nor the solution to a problem,” says EU Commissioner Vitorino. “It’s a reality.” Wiser, he suggests, to make it work for Europe than to fight it.
title: “Out Of The Shadows” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Joseph Weiner”
Now, 35 years after his death, two new books finally give Foujita his due. Published late last year by Kodansha in Tokyo, both address the most controversial chapter of his career: his war paintings. The first, a gorgeous coffee-table book titled “Leonard-Tsuguharu Foujita: The Great White,” is a comprehensive survey, featuring color images of 155 works–including five major military paintings. The second, a biography by TV journalist Fumito Kondo titled “Tsuguharu Foujita, The Life of the Foreigner,” is based largely on previously unpublished documents, as well as rare interviews with the artist’s fifth (and last) wife, Kimiyo. It depicts an insecure genius who produced war paintings to gain the respect of his compatriots. Together, the books sketch a picture of a talented and complex man obsessed with his reputation.
Foujita occupies a unique place in Japan’s modern art history. While most of his contemporaries simply copied the European masters, he established his own style, applying traditional Japanese techniques to Western oil painting. As a war artist, too, he stood out. From the mid-1930s through 1945, Japan’s military recruited hundreds of painters to glorify the war machine. Most of them were not trained to paint the huge canvases the Imperial Army wanted. But Foujita, who developed an interest in mural painting during a visit to Mexico, knew how to compose majestic tableaux. His “Battle on the Bank of the Haluha, Nomonhan,” painted on a large oblong canvas with bright colors and fine, skillful brush strokes, depicts virile Japanese soldiers running, crawling and climbing up a big tank. Prominently featured in a military-funded exhibition in 1941, the piece brought Foujita unprecedented acclaim in Japan.
As the war dragged on, the artist became increasingly nationalistic. He shed his trademark bohemian bangs, shaved his head and published jingoistic essays. Other painters wrote essays, too, but Foujita’s patriotism sounded desperate; at one point, he even declared that the Japanese would no longer need to study art in France. Biographer Kondo suggests that Foujita felt compelled to overcompensate for his artistic success on enemy land.
After Japan surrendered, on the other hand, Foujita was accused of offering to help the Americans collect war paintings as trophies in order to avoid a war-crimes charge. Although never proven, the story got repeated relentlessly, cementing his image as an unprincipled propagandist.
Foujita escaped to Paris in 1950. He gave up his Japanese citizenship and in 1959 was baptized a Roman Catholic–effectively, says Kondo, distancing himself from his homeland. After he died, Kimiyo Foujita inherited her husband’s bitterness–and copyright. She kept tight control of his estate, preventing publications from reprinting Foujita’s paintings and suing those that did without permission. It took Kondo years to persuade Kimiyo to consent to a 45-minute TV documentary on Foujita, which finally aired in 1999. While it was generally well received, some critics blasted Kondo for relying too much on his widow. “At times I thought I should be more critical,” Kondo admits.
The new books on Foujita reflect Japan’s latest efforts to come to terms with its war art. Only recently has the public even been able to view such works. In January 2002, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo held an exhibition featuring 10 war paintings, including Foujita’s “Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End” (1945), in which people kill themselves in a devastated landscape. And last summer, the Himeji City Museum of Art in western Japan organized the first mainstream exhibit dedicated to Japan’s World War II art since 1945. These marvelous, illuminating books will undoubtedly play an important part in ending that taboo.
