Roger L. Simon: Meeting Flemming and Leon

The cliché goes that we live in a small world. It's wrong. We live in a minute world these days - and it's shrinking with every digitally-enhanced second. That has it's good and bad aspects. I was reminded of the good last when, at an event in the Reagan Library (my first time there, of which more anon), I had the pleasure of meeting two men I had admired at a distance, Flemming Rose and Leon de Winter. The odd thing is I felt as if I had known them a long time, not for mystical reasons but because the Internet draws kindred spirits together. I instantly had more in common with these guys than I do with my neighbors, and not just because they are both writers - my Hollywood Hills neighborhood, as it happens, is lousy with writers - but because we all shared similar concerns and had known that about each other for some time.

So that's the good part (or one of them) of globalization - meeting colleagues form across the world and making instant friends. One of the bad parts Flemming pointed out to me last night - the perils of instant communication between the developed and the undeveloped world. He understood it better than most of us because he had experienced that danger as the man responsible for the publication of the Danish cartoons. If those cartoons had been published in a pre-Internet era, who would have known? Almost no one, probably, outside Copenhagen. In this era, the most minor bit of satire, as the cartoons were, can set off an instantaneous conflagration.

Now about the Reagan Library, it's worth a visit, despite the longish drive from LA. Reason: Air Force One is there (the one that was in service through the eighties all the way to 2001). You can go aboard. It's an interesting experience that starts you fantasizing.

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Boy, you got that right --the good, the bad, and the ugly. That title always minorly-annoyed me; I realize now because it's not balanced. There's 'good' followed by bad and ugly--one good attribute followed by two negatives. But it fits the net better than it did the movie, because in this righteous world the good is expected, while the bad--the terrorists linking up--makes for much ugly.

"If those cartoons had been published in a pre-Internet era, who would have known? Almost no one, probably, outside Copenhagen. In this era, the most minor bit of satire, as the cartoons were, can set off an instantaneous conflagration."

The people who were protesting those cartoons almost certainly had no access to the internet.

Soldier's Dad, you may be right - but the communication of what was going on came via the Internet to their leaders.

yah. The Imam is on the net. Come Friday sermon, he's ready with the week's distilled flame.

Sergio Leone's next movie was Once upon a Time in the West and its screenplay is even more "out of time" than the one for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Success brings bigger budgets and bigger stars. So there they are: Charles Bronson as The Man, Henry Fonda as Frank, and Jason Robards as Cheyenne. They're warriors in a legendary/mythical time that's coming to a close. They are, respectively, the good, the bad, and the ugly. In Leone's world "ugly" is best understood as flawed as in human and in Leone's world the ugly always ends up allied with the good, whether he likes it or not.

In Leone's world "ugly" is best understood as flawed as in human and in Leone's world the ugly always ends up allied with the good, whether he likes it or not

Great sentence, great thought. I always sort of felt there was more to Leone than "spaghetti" exploitation, but I never could put my finger on it. The optimism re human nature was deliberately buried, as you imply.

May 21, 2007: Meeting Flemming and Leon - a lesson in globalism

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