Isegoria

Zero Dark Thirty features a CIA operative treating a detainee to a sumptuous dinner for sharing information that has saved American lives:

The thing is, the detainee doesn’t remember telling his captors anything. But weak in mind and body, after several sleepless days and nights of torture, he accepts what Maya says as the truth.

We call that gaslighting:

The term itself was popularized by the 1944 film Gaslight, an adaptation of the 1939 play Angel Street. In the film, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, “Gregory,” played by Boyer, maintains that a gaslight his wife “Paula” (Bergman) sees growing dim then brightening is in fact steady. This small deception is followed by countless others. Paula initially protests her husband’s accusations about her “forgetfulness,” but in time she questions her every action and memory. In reality, her husband Gregory is plotting to have her committed to an asylum so that he can take her inheritance.

Creepy.

Ronald D. Moore answers veterans’ questions about how he got Battlestar Galactica so right:

Erich Simmers: You mentioned your study of history and your time in the Navy ROTC. Many of the questions I got were focused on your eye for military culture — specifically the people, not just the technology or battles and dates, but that very specific culture that the U. S. military has. They asked, “How did you get it so right?” Can you elaborate more on your experiences and your study of history that enabled you to tap into that culture?

Ronald D. Moore: My personal experiences were fairly limited, but I had an ear for picking up on dialogue and culture and tradition in the environments I was in. My first midshipman’s cruise was aboard the USS W. S. Sims out of Mayport, Florida freshman year. I spent about a month aboard the frigate. There were just a lot of things about living aboard a Navy ship for a month that I picked up on — the way people talked to one another, the style, the cultures going around me. When I was writing the episodes, I tapped into a lot of that.

Colonel Tigh on Battlestar — the XO on the Sims was sort of a hardass, and the crew knew he was a hardass. It was part of his job to protect the image of the captain as the kindly old man. The XO’s job was to be a tougher man than him and take all the flack, and I always remembered that. It was an interesting, deliberate choice that the man had made to run the ship that way.

Then there were little things like the announcements going over the PA. In the Battlestar miniseries, there’s an announcement that I wrote in in the background where you hear somebody say, “Attention aboard the Galactica, EVA in progress. Do not rotate or irradiate any electronic equipment while men are working outside the ship.” I remember those announcements going through the Sims everyday: “Do not rotate or irradiate any electronic equipment while men are working aloft.” Little things like that stuck in my head, and I would reach back and put into the show periodically.

Then, I just loved military history and read a lot of books through the years on World War II — in particular, carrier operations and the way the fat carriers worked in the Pacific, how the squadrons were organized, the culture of the ready room and the pilots, the ways they talked to one another, and how they planned operations. I was always fascinated with that world, so I brought my knowledge of that over.

ES: Did any part of you ever wonder what would have happened if you would have followed a Naval career rather than the path you took?

RM: Oh yeah, all the time. It’s one of those things in my past that I look back on with regret and relief at the same time, because I made the realization that while I was fascinated with it, I wasn’t really part of it. I didn’t fit well into the military. It wasn’t natural to me; I was a much better observer and journalist of it, as it were, to talk about it, study it, and fictionalize it. I didn’t function that well in it. I didn’t particularly like taking orders; I didn’t particularly like getting up early in the morning. I hated learning to write the reports — even the most basic stuff we did in ROTC of filling out reports and typing in those forms and readiness reports. Just mindless paperwork and the bureaucratic nature of the military drove me kinda batshit. [laughs] I was like, “Really?” So there were aspects of it that I just didn’t mesh completely well with. I was always somewhat apart from the rest of my unit, and I never really felt part of it. But there was a part of me that wanted to. That really wanted to be a naval officer. That really wanted to do that.

I’ll never forget, many years later, when I was on Star Trek, I was invited to go aboard the USS Constellation for a long weekend, so I flew out with a bunch of people going for a weekend cruise. We flew out off the coast of San Diego and went up to the flag bridge to watch air operations that night. When we went up to the flag bridge and looked down onto the deck, there were F/A-18s coming in and landing in this amber glow of the lights on the deck and there was just utter blackness out beyond. The planes would come out of nowhere and land on the deck and others were being catapulted off, and I had this enormous wave of emotion and feeling. There was a part of me that just so desperately wished that I was part of this — that I was doing this and I was down on that deck or I was in that aircraft or this was my job. It was the first time that it really grabbed me since I left ROTC that there was this part of me that really wanted to belong to this.

The only thing we learn from history, George Bernard Shaw quipped, is that we learn nothing from history.

Cyril Kornbluth, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, wrote his science-fiction tale, The Only Thing We Learn, soon after that war ended and not long before he died.

Here Wing Commander Arris realizes his forces — defending Earth — are doomed, as the ramshackle rebel fleet attacking them doesn’t crumble on contact with a “proper” fleet:

Lunar relay flickered out as overloaded fuses flashed into vapor. Arris distractedly paced back to the dark corner and sank into a chair.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice of Glen next to him, sounding quite sincere. “No doubt it was quite a shock to you.”

“Not to you?” asked Arris bitterly.

“Not to me.”

“Then how did they do it?” the wing commander asked the civilian in a low, desperate whisper. “They don’t even wear .45′s. Intelligence says their enlisted men have hit their officers and got away with it. They elect ship captains! Glen, what does it all mean?”

“It means,” said the fat little man with a timbre of doom in his voice, “that they’ve returned. They always have. They always will. You see, commander, there is always somewhere a wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So they go out — on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets, or the stars. They — they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And then, one day, they return to their old home.

“They return to the wealthy, powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the tundra, the planets, or the stars — a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then they sack the city, nation, or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their deeds. They always have. Doubtless they always will.”

“But what shall we do?”

“We shall cower, I suppose, beneath the bombs they drop on us, and we shall die, some bravely, some not, defending the palace within a very few hours. But you will have your revenge.”

“How?” asked the wing commander, with haunted eyes.

The fat little man giggled and whispered in the officer’s ear. Arris irritably shrugged it off as a bad joke. He didn’t believe it. As he died, drilled through the chest a few hours later by one of Algan’s gunfighters, he believed it even less.