Mission accomplished

You’ll be relieved to know that the parties and the five-minutes-of-fame radio talks are pretty much over, here at least.  I don’t think that even I could take more than a week or so, fun as it certainly is. At this point I feel like a nice couple of days in bed to recover.

Dream on. For now comes the rather more serious – and frankly more lasting -- side of raising the book’s profile. That is, going out and talking about it. First stop, on Thursday, is the London Review Bookshop for a gig with one of my colleagues in Cambridge, Chris Clark.

Chris works on the history of Germany and recently wrote a history of Prussia that won loads of prizes. We thought it would be fun to talk about first about the Romans, but then about the idea of “triumphalism” a bit more widely. So do come.

Of course, Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment is likely to be on the agenda – which was typically Roman in its amateur dramatic style. I hadn’t realised until a few weeks ago that the aircraft carrier he landed on was just off San Diego, I thought he was in at least somewhere near the Gulf. Caesar would have loved the stunt.

But we hope to open it up a bit beyond the “US = Rome (or does it?)” debate.

There’s not only the Thatcher vs Archbishop of Canterbury row about whether we should have a Falklands triumph (should we or should we not pray for the enemy dead?). There’s also how we chose to celebrate the end of World War II. As I said in the book, there were no exotic or bedraggled prisoners marched through the streets then. That’s happily been banned by international law. But in the London parades, as the newspaper reports of the time make clear, some of the foreign allies seem to have provided the “colour” that used to be offered by the prisoners. There was plenty of finger-pointing, for example, at the Greek soldiers in their skirts. It wasn’t actually very comradely.

The Moscow parade, imaginatively recreated on the left, used German standard instead of live captives.

But Chris has got some marvellous stuff on Prussian triumphs (or sometimes “triumphs avoided” which are often more interesting), so I am spending a few snatched minutes trying to learn how to tell my Frederick the Greats from my Frederick the Firsts. Plenty of howlers lying in wait there, I fear.

All this is followed the next week by some of the same in the USA (that’s the great benefit -- or the cost , depending on how you see it -- of having a US publisher). I’m doing lectures for the Laurel Society the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at the Getty Villa (a return to old haunts, there). The slightly scary bit is the discussion about the book with Niall Ferguson, the now Professor at Harvard (but once of Peterhouse, Cambridge) who wrote Empire – which I shall have certainly read by the time I get off the plane.

Why slightly scary? Well not just because Ferguson is stratospherically well known; actually everyone says he’s dead nice. It’s more the fact that in the US, it’s not so clear that the “US=Rome” debate is quite so easy to side-step and there seems, for me, quite a high risk of more than just a howler over a Prussian king. So there’s a lot of extra reading for the plane, like Cullen Murphy’s Are we Rome: the fall of an empire and the fate of America, which I’ve not yet got my hands on.

But don’t worry, there is a great party planned for afterwards. So I’ll be able to recover in the usual way.

And this is the end of these tales of self-promotion...promise!

Comments

[Xjy]

Vae victis in so many different ways. The Enemy/Satan should not only be defeated/crushed/humiliated but should be seen to be defeated/crushed/humiliated. And the form taken needn't be that of a great military parade. Frinstance, the big triumph after World War 2 was probably the Nuremberg Trials, with a great flourishing of righteousness by civilian and military, and a great display of "justice" and "magnanimity" towards the humiliated Enemy. The closest thing with respect to Iraq has been the kangaroo court job done on Saddam and the farce of his hanging."Victory Parades" just don't seem the same, really. Cromwell's head on the Traitor's Gate might be a typically British monarchistic Triumphal gesture. The British Museum the typically British Triumphal institution (maybe too arty and "civilized" by half, perhaps the V&A with its monstrous plunder of furnishing artefacts is the quintessential locus of the locusts). Public display can wrap its ideological tentacles around us in more permanently penetrating and subtle ways these days.
An interesting and weird phenomenon today is the "inverted Triumphalism" of turning defeat into victory and demanding permanent Triumphalism as a token of civic goodness. It's hard to tell whether Hollywood or Washington or the Rabid Right Rapturites win the palm here.
Hope you have a clause prohibiting the publishers from pulping any surplus volumes, by the way. They'd be much more use in your garden shed ready to be snapped up for half-a-crown apiece by interested fans :-)

[Al Schlaf]

Indeed.

I posted, on a current events/political internet forum, a comparison between Bush's "Mission Accomplished" bit and the citation in your book on Roman triumphs of Germanicus' triumph as reported by Tacitus.

The resident neo-cons in that forum were either too embarrassed to contest the comparison or too ignorant of the context to protest. I'd like to be confident of the former, but am more of the latter.

[Jackie]

I really must read things more carefully! I read it as Niall Ferguson is dead and wondered how I'd missed the obituary!
Seriously, have fun in America.

[poliwog]

On your US visit, you can also look forward to obedient Bush apologists dutifully chanting their talking points and cover stories like well-rehearsed parrots.

[Eileen]

adding to Richard's comment.. the entire performance delayed by a number of hours the soldiers' return to their families.

[Richard]

And don't forget that the ship was turned round and sailed out to sea again so that Bush could perform his antics.

[Joseph Ferrette]

You would be better served by reading Murphy's sister: Kaitlin's book about the 1908 baseball season than his own.

The research is impressive and the characters far more interesting.

[Julia from Illinois]

I hope you realize that the banner in the background was hung by and refers to the personnel on the ship. They were on their way home after completing THEIR MISSION.

Someone is surely going to bring this up while you are in the US.