Fog of War - The Movie!

Thanks to the magic of the internets (and the good folks at Google), here's The Fog of War in its entirety. This works especially well for those of you who have various tests this week and won't be able to watch some or all of the film in class.

Again, think in terms of empathy and parallels. Yes, there's a lot of history referenced -- some you may be familiar with and some you may be encountering for the first time. The important thing in the context of 21CC, though, is that you take a minute (or 107 of them) to think about Robert McNamara as a precursor to you, the 21C Challenger. He and his generation faced largescale issues; we face largescale issues. He had his ups and he had his downs, many of them on the largest of large scales. Pay attention to the eleven lessons the film enumerates but also see if you can't extract other lessons that are just as (more?) pertinent to your own experience.

And as Mr. Reardon suggested this morning, think about how interconnected our own "21C Challenges" are to what has come before. To wit: WWI leads to WWII leads to the Cold War leads to the Soviets in Afghanistan leads to Osama bin Laden's U.S.-aided paramilitary career leads to...21C Challenge. There are about a gazillion Matrushka dolls just like that one. Or at least four or five. (And perhaps the bin Laden sequence is an oversimplification, to some degree.) Point is, knowing the history is crucial. Just because there wasn't the internet for the vast majority of the 20C doesn't mean it's not relevant to our current circumstances.