WSJ Historically Speaking: From Ancient Greece to the Oscars, Acting Prizes Have Always Meant Drama

Photo: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Photo: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Some kind of controversy always seems to surround the Oscars. If it isn’t outrage beforehand over who was snubbed, it is derision afterward about the embarrassing speeches or the taste-­‐challenged outfits that were paraded down the red carpet.

Yet the “Oscar effect” on nominated movies can be transformative. In 2004, a low-key film about a female boxer had earned just $8.5 million. But after being nominated for best picture, “Million Dollar Baby” enjoyed a spectacular resurgence and raked in additional $56.4 million, according to the website Box Office Mojo.

The enormous financial rewards that the Oscars can bring are a far cry from the more modest prizes given out by their spiritual ancestor, the ancient Greek festival of Dionysus. Most historians agree that the festival was responsible for awarding the first drama prizes in history. The original winner, in the sixth century B.C., is said to have been Thespis, from whom the word “thespian” came. Instead of a golden statuette, Thespis received a live goat.

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The Sunday Times: Read Obama’s lips: he has just skewered President Hillary

Photo: Travel Coffee Book

Photo: Travel Coffee Book

BACK in 1998, Nicole Kidman was playing in the West End, stunning audiences with her naked turn in The Blue Room. It was a performance memorably described by Charles Spencer, the Daily Telegraph critic, as “pure theatrical Viagra”.

Over in the United States, we were watching our own version of The Blue Room as the sex saga of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky played out almost nightly on our screens. But the only performance that really mattered that year was the night Clinton delivered his State of the Union speech to a Republican-dominated Congress.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: The Battle to Include Women

Photo: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES)

Photo: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES)

Since its staid beginnings in 1971 as an annual management symposium at a Swiss ski resort, the World Economic Forum in Davos has grown into the premier talking shop for the global financial elite.

But Huntington’s Davos Man highlights another issue about the forum: It was (and is) overwhelmingly male. This year, some 19% of the 2,500 delegates were women, according to the forum—a number that has barely changed since a (widely ignored) quota system meant to involve more women was imposed by the event’s corporate sponsors in 2011. (Saadia Zahidi, who heads the forum’s gender-parity initiative, said that the gender ratio in Davos reflects “global leadership as a whole” and that the forum is working to increase women’s participation.)

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The Sunday Times: As US racial harmony chokes and gasps, a bigger enemy looks on

Photo: The Independent

Photo: The Independent

New York in the late 1980s and 1990s was a polarised city state, where whites and minority groups lived side by side but in no sense together. They were, to use a phrase coined at the time, “the closest of strangers”.

My arrival in New York in 1987 coincided with the notorious Tawana Brawley case. Tawana was a 15-year-old African-American girl from upstate New York who was abducted and raped by a group of white men. Tawana was subsequently found in a semi-conscious state inside a rubbish bag with racial insults, including “KKK”, “N*****” and “Bitch”, scrawled across her body.

One of her alleged assailants was a local policeman, who committed suicide the week after Tawana was found. Another worked as an assistant district attorney.

Even before Tawana’s ordeal, passions were high in New York because of an incident the previous year in Howard Beach, Queens, in which a black teenager had been killed while trying to escape a white mob. Her assault raised tensions to a whole new level. Howard Beach had been about working-class racial tensions, the kind that New Yorkers were all too familiar with. The Brawley crime implicated the white male establishment.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: The “Unbroken Spirit” to Survive

Photo: BETTMANN/CORBIS

Photo: BETTMANN/CORBIS

Louis Zamperini was a U.S. Olympic runner, World War II hero and Japanese prison-­‐camp survivor who went on to become a Christian motivational speaker. The extraordinary suffering and hardship that he endured to come home became the subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s best-­‐selling biography “Unbroken” and Angelina Jolie’s recent film of the same title.

One reason why Zamperini resonates with audiences is because his story harks back to classical mythology. The qualities that enabled Zamperini to survive his epic journey—courage, resourcefulness and resilience—were highly prized by the ancient Greeks. A man who displayed them was said to possess arête, broadly defined as moral excellence in the course of fulfilling a specific purpose. For the Greeks, the original Zamperini was Odysseus, whose return to Ithaca after the battle of Troy cost him many arduous trials and lasted 10 years.

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The Sunday Times: Modern authoritarians aren’t out to kill freedom, merely cripple it

In 1984 the French intellectual, Jean-François Revel, now deceased, published How Democracies Perish, in which he predicted: “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before

Photo: Jean-Frederic Fortier

Photo: Jean-Frederic Fortier

our eyes.”

Less than a decade later, spurred by the fall of the Berlin Wall, he appeared to take the opposite view in Democracy Against Itself, claiming: “Democracy is not only conceivable, it is inevitable. It has been indispensable, but until now it was not inevitable.”

Not surprisingly, Revel, a staunch supporter of America’s battle against the Soviet Union, was ridiculed by critics for his inconsistency.

I didn’t give much thought to Revel after that; at least, not until this year when I began my trek across the world on behalf of the BBC. Then I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I began to see for myself what life is like when there is no such thing as a Bill of Rights, or separation between church and state, or between state and party.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: The Glory Days of Frankincense and Myrrh

Photo: PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

Photo: PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

The Magi, the three wise men, famously offered the baby Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. We can still understand why they brought gold, but what Mary and Joseph were meant to do with the frankincense and myrrh—resins derived from the Boswellia and Commiphora trees—has become less obvious.

The usual explanation for the Magi’s gifts is that they symbolized the trajectory of Jesus’ life: gold to announce his divine origins and kingship, frankincense (which was burned in religious ceremonies) to declare his future role as a priest, and myrrh (which was used in burials) to represent his suffering and death.

But to the ancients, the significance of frankincense and myrrh went far beyond their spiritual symbolism. Both commodities had played a central role in daily life since the dawn of civilization. The resins were introduced to Egypt in the third millennium B.C. from the Land of Punt (thought to have been somewhere between Ethiopia and Eritrea).

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The Sunday Times: The digital robber barons are draining our cultural lifeblood

Photo: Startup Stock Photos

Photo: Startup Stock Photos

The internet is not an act of God or an untameable force against which humanity has no control or defences. The individuals who run the world’s biggest tech companies are not more praiseworthy, capable or enlightened than the leaders of traditional businesses. They certainly don’t deserve the right or power to destroy the basic tenets of civilised society simply because there are profits to be made.

Yet we act as though this is the case. It is time for us to stop sleep-walking into a future created by a handful of monopolists and loophole-scroungers.

Earlier this year I wrote about the threat that Amazon’s near monopoly and monopsony of the book trade poses to the marketplace of ideas and, indeed, the bedrock of democracy.

Monopolistic power is a major aspect of the social battles raging between society and the tech giants, but it is not only the one. Parasitism — digital businesses that have found legal ways to bleed established sectors (news, music, film and retail) dry — is another. The two often go hand in hand as evinced by such companies as Google, Facebook and Spotify.

Their destructive force is subtle. Last week the century-old The New Republic (TNR), one of the most venerable opinion journals in America, collapsed under the resignation of about 50 of its staff and contributing editors. The walkout was so sudden that the December issue had to be cancelled. Whether there will still be a TNR worth saving in January is anybody’s guess.

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WSJ historically Speaking: How the Original Geneva Convention Created Rules for War

Photo: EVERETT COLLECTION

Photo: EVERETT COLLECTION

If there is any comfort in this week’s publication of a Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-9/11 treatment of terrorist suspects, it lies in the fact that torture and cruelty aren’t the common features of war that they once were. Unlike previous ages, the modern world has explicit standards of conduct, laid down by the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which almost 200 countries are now signatories.

The abuse of prisoners of war—whether for pleasure, to extract information or to demoralize the enemy—has been part of recorded history since at least the Assyrians in the first millennium B.C. In 875 B.C., King Ashurnasirpal II boasted, “Many captives…I burned with fire. From some I cut off their hands and their fingers, and from others I cut off their noses, their ears…of many I put out the eyes.”

The man behind the adoption of a universal moral code of warfare was the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross. In the summer of 1864, spurred by the suffering he had witnessed after the Battle of Solferino (1859), Dunant brought together the representatives of more than a dozen governments. He invited them to become the first signatories of the original Geneva Convention. By December, 12 states had signed, including Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark and Spain. Britain followed in 1865, Russia in 1867, the U.S. in 1882.

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The Sunday Times: Ferguson is burning as Mississippi did. In 50 years we haven’t learnt

Photo: Katleen Vanacker

Photo: Katleen Vanacker

The slaughter of innocents cries out for justice. That is precisely what happened on Monday, when a terrible race crime finally received closure. Although the murder must never be forgotten, Americans can now feel some satisfaction that the proper recognition has taken place. As President Barack Obama said: “We must continue to fight for the ideals of equality and justice for which they gave their lives.”

No, I have not lost my mind. All this did happen. But, as you may have guessed, I am not referring to the announcement in Ferguson, Missouri, that no charges would be brought against the white policeman who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. I’m talking about an event that took place 50 years ago in Neshoba County, Mississippi, when three civil rights workers — two white and one black, named Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney — were killed by the Ku Klux Klan. At the White House the three men were posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in America.

The reason I’m linking Ferguson with Mississippi Burning (as the event is known) is not the piquancy of having the two events on the same day — although it cannot be ignored — but that there is a clarity that comes with historical perspective.

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