Up In the Air (2009)

Walter Kern, author of the novel Up in The Air described his inspiration for the unusual book in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. “I was flying and received a rare upgrade to first class and began a conversation with a businessman. I asked him where he was from and he answered quizzically, “I am from here”. Kern found himself fascinated by the prospect of trying to picture the life of a man who flies 322 days and up to 350,000 miles a year. The result of Kern’s musings was the 2006 novel, which also struck the fascination of father and son movie team Ivan and Jason Reitman. Jason, the younger Reitman, was the director of Juno, the surprise indie hit of 2007. He took the novel and ran with it. No doubt he ran directly toward the Hollywood establishment, but his fresh and quirky sensibility enlivens the film as it had Juno.

Ryan Bingham played by George Clooney, has his flying routine down pat. He travels light and with maximum efficiency. His metaphorical backpack is never burdened with unnecessary material objects or emotional baggage. He does not get attached. His smug smile is sincere and endearing, he knows exactly who he is and likes himself just fine. He desires neither entangling relationships nor family, and his only goal besides material success is some magical number of flying miles he is unwilling to reveal. Oh yes, his job is to fly from city to city, company to company, to tell people they have been fired-in the most impersonal, legal, and professional terms possible. He is very good at it. You could call him a model hatchet man in the era of the Great Recession.

Few could make such a man likeable but George Clooney as Bingham seems to carry the burden of his job with such ease and charm, he succeeds. When he meets Alex Goran, played by Vera Farmiga, an attractive, mature female frequent flyer in a hotel bar, the banter is so quick and witty it could pass for foreplay. They are both so good at this type of encounter its climax is a forgone conclusion. A scene where they sit across from one another, laptop to laptop, fingers flying to book the next tryst into their busy schedules, and finish in a dead heat is an instant classic. Only the unpredictable can disturb the smooth superficiality of the life-style, and of course it happens.

The satirical elements of the movie are obvious but its redeeming merit to me was the scenes of interaction between the hitman and the freshly fired. The reactions of everyday people who have devoted their years and careers to their company only to meet this sudden end puts a human face on the human toll of economic downturns. This pathos is uncomfortably real and makes the movie an entertaining reflection of its times.





Up in the Air: Directed by Jason Reitman. Screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner. Starring George Clooney, Jason Bateman, Vera Farmiga, Karen Keener.

The Cold War Era: The Beginning

WWII proved to be the most devastating and disastrous war in human history. The military casualties were high, but there were a staggering number of civilian casualties. By 1943, Nazi Germany had 300 concentration camps and the Germans had begun the process of mass extermination known as the “final solution”. The Holocaust took over twelve million lives. The vast majority of these were innocent civilians who committed such crimes as being Jewish, Gypsy, disabled, mentally or physically ill, a political dissident, a religious protester or just an undesirable. Jews made up half of the total and were almost eliminated from the European population. Poland, for instance saw a Jewish population of 2.7 million Jews before the war reduced to less than sixty thousand. Victims were men, women, and children who were first herded into ghettoes and then systematically shipped by railroads to the numerous death camps. The toll was not known until the end of the war when the camps were liberated. All this happened in a country whose military had the highest literacy rate in the world.

Americans were shocked by the horrors of the war and eager to put it behind them as the war ended in 1945. When news of what the death camp liberators found became public knowledge, Americans felt justified for their participation in the “good war”. However, no sooner was the war over than a new chill spread over American society in the form of the “Cold War”. The Cold War was an ideological rivalry that pitted the US and its allies against the USSR or Soviet Union. The unique facet of this war was the reality of nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb had ended WWII and became the most decisive weapon in the Cold War, although it was never used again after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The Russians developed and tested their own bomb in 1949, the same year that Mao Tse Tung’s communist army finally succeeded in ending China’s long civil war victoriously. At this point, two thirds of the world’s population lived under communism. Many Americans believed they had much to fear, and that fear became a large part of the Cold War era.

The turn around that US foreign policy made after WWII from the previous war could not have been more dramatic. It was highlighted by a speech made by President Harry Truman in 1947 to a joint session of congress asking for 400 million dollars for military aid to Greece and Turkey. In it, Truman pledged to support nations whose liberty was threatened by totalitarian aggression for the sake of “free peoples anywhere in the world”. The speech became known as the Truman Doctrine. Combined with George Kennan’s Containment policy, the belief that communism would spread if not systematically met and contained, it validated a series of interventions and covert operations to destabilize communist countries and left-leaning governments around the world for the next 40 years. The controversial Marshall Plan for financial aid to Europe was intended to thwart communism which was thought to spread wherever material deprivation and social injustice was prevalent. The plan proved successful as an economic recovery seeded by the $17 billion in aid revived businesses in Western European, which also led to profits at home for Americans. However, by that time the Soviet Union and the US and its western allies consolidated their power within their spheres of influence in Germany. Although a joint occupation of Berlin had been agreed upon, the city lay well within the Soviet zone. Russian leader Joseph Stalin blockaded the western entrance to Berlin. Truman responded by organizing a massive airlift of food and other supplies to sustain West Berliners. After a year of blockade and approaching the brink of war Stalin gave up the blockade. The Berlin Wall was built separating East and West Berlin and became a permanent fixture symbolizing the antagonism between the two superpowers and ideological enemies for the next 42 years.

World War II and US Intervention

The Treaty of Versailles (1919) left the global powers that had participated in the Great War with a structural imbalance that would prove fatal to the cause of lasting peace. The withdrawal of Russia during the war, and the unwillingness of the US to sign the treaty afterwards left a precarious balance in Europe. Great Britain and France, victors in the war, and Germany the main defeated power, had to determine a relationship going forward absent the involvement of the Unites States and Russia. President Wilson had emphasized the need for international cooperation and peaceful adjudication of grievances through the auspices of the new League of Nations. However, both France and England opted for a punitive treatment of Germany. The Germans were bitter in defeat and felt they had been betrayed in the war and the treaty negotiations. They viewed as insult and injury the $50 billion dollars in war reparations that were imposed on them. Considering the difficulty that the western democracies had in winning the war, and the fact that France and England no longer had the US or the USSR available to them, the course they took proved shortsighted and doomed a lasting peace to failure.

The bitterness, frustration and instability of Germany was apparent. Representative government was thrust upon the Germans by the allies and it was fragile at best. The Weimar Republic had to contend with armed paramilitary extremists from left and right from the outset. After the failure of an attempted coup by the communist in1919 known as the Spartacus Revolt, the Hitler led Nazi Party also attempted to topple the republic. In 1923, a poorly planned and executed coup attempt by the Nazis was suppressed and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison. He ended up serving a total of six months of house arrest in a villa owned by a powerful industrialist. He used the down time to write his plan for Germany’s future, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In it he described in detail the whole sordid saga that became Germany’s future from 1933-1945. At the time, few paid attention. A decade later the rambling memoir became required reading while the German classics, from Faust to Kant to Goethe were being burned by the Nazi Party.

The US danced through the Twenties until the stock market crashed in 1929. Americans, disillusioned by the failure to “make the world safe for democracy”, as Wilson had promised, wanted no part of political engagement with Europe. Trade and investment were the focus of business minded America as far as Europe was concerned. International finances were less understood then than they are today, and they were a mess. Great Britain and France attempted to hold Germany to the huge reparation payments they were forced to make to the allies for war guilt. The US was insisting on payment for material shipped to France and Great Britain during the war. America had come out of the war a $10 billion dollar creditor. The allies asked for forgiveness of the debt but the government refused. Meanwhile Germany was seeking loans for US investment banks in order to make reparation payments. Credit was holding up the circular flow of money and Europeans were having a hard time rebuilding their damaged economies. US corporations were selling goods to Europe and invoked the aid of Congress to erect tariff barriers. Europe was being squeezed dry of the small amounts of capital it had. American business was in for a huge shock and the shock began in October 1929.

The economic depression that began with the US stock market crash in 1929 had far-reaching political implications as it spread around the world. In Germany, the Nazi Party had 100,000 members in 1929. However, after three years of a worsening economy that saw unemployment reach 40%, three million Germans voted for the Nazi party in the elections of 1932. What had eluded Hitler and the Nazis by violence came to them through the chaos that had become the parliamentary process in Germany by then. The 85 year old President Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. The Nazis rose to power by manipulating the republic that they despised and had tried to overthrow. In 1933 a mysterious fire burned down the Reichstag and Hitler declared martial law. The first concentration camps were under construction by the end of that year.

The years 1933-39 could well be called the Lost Opportunity to stop Germany’s aggression under Hitler, leading to WWII. His violations of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles began with the rearming of Germany. When this met with no response he took the next step up of resigning Germany from the League of Nations. Again, receiving rebuke but no measures from the League he began occupying the Rhineland a DMZ (demilitarized zone) 1936. In the same year he formed an alliance with Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy, and Japan also joined the Axis powers. Each time the leaders of the west objected, Hitler assured them of his interest in peace and they acquiesced. This pattern continued with the invasion of Austria, forcibly joining it to the German nation, and finally the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, a treaty member of the League of Nations. By 1938 the Wermacht, the German war machine was almost fully operational. Hitler signed a treaty with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that allowed England’s leader to go home declaring “peace in our time” had been achieved. But nine months later Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. The ostrich that was the west finally had to take its head out of the sand and WWII began.

The US government and its citizens watched the proceedings in Europe and once again remained firmly committed to neutrality. Once again, the US began material help to the allies through the Lend Lease program. Roosevelt knew that the US would need to get into the war but the determined objection of the American people stood in the way. In 1940, with France defeated and Hitler posing for pictures under the Arc de Triumph, a survey of the American people found that 90% still wanted to remain neutral. Although preparations for war had begun, Roosevelt’s hands were tied until the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is said that when Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of embattled England heard news of that attack he danced a jig. Finally, the Americans were in the war.