Monday, January 29, 2007
The Seventh Continent (this post is full of spoilers)
This is Michael Haneke's first film (Haneke being the Austrian director who later made Cache, The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf), and it's among the more fucked-up I've seen in awhile. It's based on the true story of a Viennese middle class family who, alienated by modern life, quit their jobs, tell everyone they're moving to Australia, destroy all their possessions and kill their daughter and then themselves.
It came out in 1989, so the technologies of consumer electronics and chemical factories and, to a lesser extent, the hair all appear worthy of destruction, but nonetheless, the extremely measured pacing gives way to a glorious orgy of systematically flushing all their cash, ripping shirt seams, bashing dressers, shattering mirrors and upending lamps. The centerpiece of the home is a large fish tank that basically contains an entire ecosystem, and although his wife shouts "Nein!" the husband tears into it with a sledge hammer, flooding the living room and sending dozens of fish to flop around on wet shards of glass, over a thick layer of household jetsam.
Their eight-year old daughter begins to cry, for the fish, for herself, and against the game that suddenly turned nasty and manic. Haneke's brilliance lies in the ability to reveal the family's zealous nihilism shot through with doubt and fear, because the viewer can't help but enjoy the parade of destructive images--until the fish tank and the daughter's reaction make you experience shame and disgust. As the fish begin to die, the three eat their last meal (which is basically champagne plus all the food they had left in the house) and retreat to a ruined bedroom to watch television. The mother gives her daughter poisoned milk before ingesting some kind of poison herself, drinking from a glass that once stored her toothbrush. The glass, a symbol of bourgeois virtue, of morning/evening routine, and of the bland little obligations that bookend the day, is one of the few things left intact in the home and the same item the husband uses to take his own life, similarly by poisoning, as well. His and hers suicides.
At some point, maybe after flushing tens of thousands of Deutsche marks, they passed the point of no return and simply tried to enjoy themselves until the inevitable happened and the concentric circles of demolition fell at last to their own bodies, by which time they would be so ex-static or numb with exhaustion that the exercise might almost be painless. The daughter's tears over the fish completely derail that climaxing emotional movement, but the mother knows that they can't undo the damage and so has to kill her daughter, anyway. Having murdered her only child, she must murder herself, and in fact dies horribly. The father, alone in a dark house with only the glow of the staticky television, writes their names and times of death on a wall as soon as he swallows the poison. If he had spared the fish their concussive deaths, had not advanced his strategic annihilations too prematurely, they might have at least died together, ending the brutal separation they'd each perceived and which drove them to their insane act. By shattering the glass, he condemned every animal in the house to die alone and--in the case of himself and his wife--consumed with fears and regrets as impossible to bottle back up as water gushing from the busted fish tank.
It came out in 1989, so the technologies of consumer electronics and chemical factories and, to a lesser extent, the hair all appear worthy of destruction, but nonetheless, the extremely measured pacing gives way to a glorious orgy of systematically flushing all their cash, ripping shirt seams, bashing dressers, shattering mirrors and upending lamps. The centerpiece of the home is a large fish tank that basically contains an entire ecosystem, and although his wife shouts "Nein!" the husband tears into it with a sledge hammer, flooding the living room and sending dozens of fish to flop around on wet shards of glass, over a thick layer of household jetsam.
Their eight-year old daughter begins to cry, for the fish, for herself, and against the game that suddenly turned nasty and manic. Haneke's brilliance lies in the ability to reveal the family's zealous nihilism shot through with doubt and fear, because the viewer can't help but enjoy the parade of destructive images--until the fish tank and the daughter's reaction make you experience shame and disgust. As the fish begin to die, the three eat their last meal (which is basically champagne plus all the food they had left in the house) and retreat to a ruined bedroom to watch television. The mother gives her daughter poisoned milk before ingesting some kind of poison herself, drinking from a glass that once stored her toothbrush. The glass, a symbol of bourgeois virtue, of morning/evening routine, and of the bland little obligations that bookend the day, is one of the few things left intact in the home and the same item the husband uses to take his own life, similarly by poisoning, as well. His and hers suicides.
At some point, maybe after flushing tens of thousands of Deutsche marks, they passed the point of no return and simply tried to enjoy themselves until the inevitable happened and the concentric circles of demolition fell at last to their own bodies, by which time they would be so ex-static or numb with exhaustion that the exercise might almost be painless. The daughter's tears over the fish completely derail that climaxing emotional movement, but the mother knows that they can't undo the damage and so has to kill her daughter, anyway. Having murdered her only child, she must murder herself, and in fact dies horribly. The father, alone in a dark house with only the glow of the staticky television, writes their names and times of death on a wall as soon as he swallows the poison. If he had spared the fish their concussive deaths, had not advanced his strategic annihilations too prematurely, they might have at least died together, ending the brutal separation they'd each perceived and which drove them to their insane act. By shattering the glass, he condemned every animal in the house to die alone and--in the case of himself and his wife--consumed with fears and regrets as impossible to bottle back up as water gushing from the busted fish tank.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Perpetual Electioneering
It's kind of disturbing that the 2008 began virtually as the Congress elected in 2006 sat. Even the hardiest political junkies cannot maintain a this level of enthusiasm for another twenty-one months. Either we're going to enter a sort of "Phony War" phase where ten or more Republicans and eight or more Democrats are "running" for president in that everything they say and do will be judged in light of that fact as they amass the half-billion dollars each eventual nominee will likely raise--but no one will be campaigning per se; it will be like Nazi Germany versus France and Britain through early 1940.
It would be nice to think that the media wants to inform the populace, but really, they exist to sell soap and laser hair removal, so permanent campaigns will frictionlessly establish themselves in the collective consciousness, akin to the crawl at the bottom of CNN or the time-temperature-stock-market-indices-and-station-logo zone at the bottom right. Nobody appears to acknowledge what a monumental distraction elections are from the actual business of governance. It's a good thing Nancy Pelosi achieved her 100 Hours of Legislation in fewer than fifty--now we can stare at Hillary and Obama.
We've become like Texas. Only instead of a system where the legislature meets for a short period every other year, after which everyone returns to his or her real job, that formerly fallow season is now filled with bickering and pander. Like ads on the side of the bus. How was that canvas ever permitted to be ad-free for so long? It was just sitting there. Same for 2007. I mean, come on, Bush really sucks. Better to prepare for 2009 when he's out of office than to use the remaining two years to demand oversight, accountability and responsible legislation, right?
Add to this the fact that big states, annoyed at the clout that Iowa and New Hampshire jealously guard, have threatened to front-load their primaries earlier and earlier. Two tiny states in the Frostbelt haven't always caucused in mid-winter. That happened over a period of time, and we can reasonably expect primaries a full year before the general in not very long. Moreover, when people wonder why we haven't had a black president yet, they should probably look at the ethnic composition of Iowa and New Hampshire. They are 93% and 97% white, respectively. If we don't have at least a de facto national primary day (which, if I truly got my druthers, would be held after Labor Day...although I'm betting on Valentine's Day at the latest), we should probably just let the entire field of candidates get vetted by a gated subdivision in Orange County, California. It would preserve the whites-only kingmaker status of the current calendar, but the climate would be gentler on the kids MoveOn buses in.
It would be nice to think that the media wants to inform the populace, but really, they exist to sell soap and laser hair removal, so permanent campaigns will frictionlessly establish themselves in the collective consciousness, akin to the crawl at the bottom of CNN or the time-temperature-stock-market-indices-and-station-logo zone at the bottom right. Nobody appears to acknowledge what a monumental distraction elections are from the actual business of governance. It's a good thing Nancy Pelosi achieved her 100 Hours of Legislation in fewer than fifty--now we can stare at Hillary and Obama.
We've become like Texas. Only instead of a system where the legislature meets for a short period every other year, after which everyone returns to his or her real job, that formerly fallow season is now filled with bickering and pander. Like ads on the side of the bus. How was that canvas ever permitted to be ad-free for so long? It was just sitting there. Same for 2007. I mean, come on, Bush really sucks. Better to prepare for 2009 when he's out of office than to use the remaining two years to demand oversight, accountability and responsible legislation, right?
Add to this the fact that big states, annoyed at the clout that Iowa and New Hampshire jealously guard, have threatened to front-load their primaries earlier and earlier. Two tiny states in the Frostbelt haven't always caucused in mid-winter. That happened over a period of time, and we can reasonably expect primaries a full year before the general in not very long. Moreover, when people wonder why we haven't had a black president yet, they should probably look at the ethnic composition of Iowa and New Hampshire. They are 93% and 97% white, respectively. If we don't have at least a de facto national primary day (which, if I truly got my druthers, would be held after Labor Day...although I'm betting on Valentine's Day at the latest), we should probably just let the entire field of candidates get vetted by a gated subdivision in Orange County, California. It would preserve the whites-only kingmaker status of the current calendar, but the climate would be gentler on the kids MoveOn buses in.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
The Glass is Three-Quarters Empty
I forgot that January 20 has passed, meaning there's less than two years till the inauguration of the new president. So we're in the last throes, if you will, of the Bushies. I'm of two minds as to whether or not the next White House occupant will roll back all the ruinous policies and procedures of the current administration, or if after eight years of grotesque aberrations a new, skewed normality will have set in. Probably somewhere between the two. Some odious features of this president's way of doing things that will likely endure are press conferences full of unchallenged lies, interference into embarrassing bureaucratic reports, and the release of critical information on Friday evenings. When the White House lifts its portcullis to divulge bad news they can't get away from, it's usually after the correspondents' pool has left for the weekend.
So we've only got a couple of years left until (hopefully) we get a Democrat in there, sitting on top of a Congress that is tilted ever more to the left (with 21 Republicans and only 9 Democrats in the Senate up for re-election in 2008, I can't envision a Senate that isn't at least 53-45-2, even accounting for the fact that Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and probably Tim Johnson (D-SD) will lose, but that's a tangent).
Even still, the war will hemorrhage our resources and attention. It's clear that the entire affair is gradually being palmed off onto the team (and highly likely presidential ticket) of McCain-Lieberman, the sainted maverick and his loyal bipartisan cover. If they should win in 2008, we'll literally be at war forever. If they lose and Democrats advocate withdrawal from Iraq, the narrative which the right will push with all its might will be that we could have won, but for those weak liberals who pulled out just as victory as only 6-9 months away. And when someone nukes Chicago in 2013, it will be because spineless Democrats betrayed our resolve, not because the U.S. continues to act like a complete asshole. I eagerly await a new generation of gutless warmongers rattling sabers at Teheran, as long as other people's sons and daughters patrol its slums and attempt to differentiate Shiite from Sunni.
Isn't it weird that, for all their self-congratulation and selective trumpeting of facts, no one in the military or federal government even discusses Afghanistan? Korea is called the Forgotten War, but no one seems to remember that we are actually losing two wars right now. Is the American psyche so fragile that our predilections for self-hagiography can't tolerate the fact that we're both hyperpower and double loser? There's no room in the national meta-narrative for losses of this magnitude. It's taboo. If you bring it up, you must be an America-hater on the scale of Jean Baudrillard. Joe Lieberman might still be trotting out the absolutely contemptible falsehood that the people we're fighting in Iraq are the ones who attacked us in 2001 (unless he just means 'Muslims'), but not even Dick Cheney has the gall to crow about how the obviously resurgent Taliban are at the end of their rope.
The point of all this is that while it might feel good to know the clock's ticking on the Bush Administration--especially now that it lost its compliant Congress--I'm skeptical on just how much of a restoration of good governance and truthfulness we can really expect to see. Led by our fawning media, we're doing a fine job of allowing the unacceptable to morph into white noise and unpleasant wars to go utterly unreported.
So we've only got a couple of years left until (hopefully) we get a Democrat in there, sitting on top of a Congress that is tilted ever more to the left (with 21 Republicans and only 9 Democrats in the Senate up for re-election in 2008, I can't envision a Senate that isn't at least 53-45-2, even accounting for the fact that Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and probably Tim Johnson (D-SD) will lose, but that's a tangent).
Even still, the war will hemorrhage our resources and attention. It's clear that the entire affair is gradually being palmed off onto the team (and highly likely presidential ticket) of McCain-Lieberman, the sainted maverick and his loyal bipartisan cover. If they should win in 2008, we'll literally be at war forever. If they lose and Democrats advocate withdrawal from Iraq, the narrative which the right will push with all its might will be that we could have won, but for those weak liberals who pulled out just as victory as only 6-9 months away. And when someone nukes Chicago in 2013, it will be because spineless Democrats betrayed our resolve, not because the U.S. continues to act like a complete asshole. I eagerly await a new generation of gutless warmongers rattling sabers at Teheran, as long as other people's sons and daughters patrol its slums and attempt to differentiate Shiite from Sunni.
Isn't it weird that, for all their self-congratulation and selective trumpeting of facts, no one in the military or federal government even discusses Afghanistan? Korea is called the Forgotten War, but no one seems to remember that we are actually losing two wars right now. Is the American psyche so fragile that our predilections for self-hagiography can't tolerate the fact that we're both hyperpower and double loser? There's no room in the national meta-narrative for losses of this magnitude. It's taboo. If you bring it up, you must be an America-hater on the scale of Jean Baudrillard. Joe Lieberman might still be trotting out the absolutely contemptible falsehood that the people we're fighting in Iraq are the ones who attacked us in 2001 (unless he just means 'Muslims'), but not even Dick Cheney has the gall to crow about how the obviously resurgent Taliban are at the end of their rope.
The point of all this is that while it might feel good to know the clock's ticking on the Bush Administration--especially now that it lost its compliant Congress--I'm skeptical on just how much of a restoration of good governance and truthfulness we can really expect to see. Led by our fawning media, we're doing a fine job of allowing the unacceptable to morph into white noise and unpleasant wars to go utterly unreported.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The Silence
I continue to have new favorite Bergman films all the time. The first half of this one is forty-five minutes of the best filmmaking you'll ever see. It's the simple story of two sisters, Ester and Ana, and Ana's young son Johan traveling through an unnamed European country on the cusp of (civil?) war. One of them gets sick, and they're held up in a hotel for a few days.
Since the controversy of such things has long worn off, I tend to look right past implied lesbian incest, but it's there.
That said, the titular silence is the sort of miasmic alienation one expects from midcentury European modernism. Ana more or less abandons her son in the hotel, goes to the movies and sees a couple having sex before bringing a grizzled waiter back to her room. Ester, who appears to be dying of TB, lies around in self-disgust, half-drunk and feverish. She's the erudite aesthete of the two, but there really isn't a spirit/flesh dichotomy to their characters inasmuch as they are both victims of, well, phallogocentrism in different ways.
In my second-favorite scene, Ana leaves the movie theater and is caught in a tide of men on the sidewalk. She's dizzy and with a war approaching there's a weird combination of tension and an absence of tension on the street. It's sort of an inverted foreplay; war operates as a torturous tease, an inability to find release or ejaculate. And phallic symbols abound: writing implements, a tube of lipstick, a tank's gun swiveling aimlessly in a city square--that last one, especially, embodies the exquisite unpleasure of being locked permanently at the moment just before release.
There are only a few other characters, a concierge/bellman/room service waiter who seems to be running the near-empty hotel by himself and a troupe of performing little people. The hotelier is tall and elderly, with protruding teeth and thick black glasses. Like the performers, he's grotesque in the literal sense. But he's profoundly kind, comforting Ester in her delirious discomfort (my favorite scene) and offering Johan half a bar of chocolate.
As the adult characters seldom speak, his uncomprehending but nearly nonstop chatter highlights the silence at the center of discourse. This is a film about the inability of any two people in a godless universe to communicate, how trying to get through is futile. Any sensitivity to or suffering from the subsequent alienation of this reality can drive people into misguided and increasingly desperate attempts to connect in ever-more spectacular or sensational ways. Fucking a stranger is as moral or amoral as withdrawing to the solitude of your bed.
Since the controversy of such things has long worn off, I tend to look right past implied lesbian incest, but it's there.
That said, the titular silence is the sort of miasmic alienation one expects from midcentury European modernism. Ana more or less abandons her son in the hotel, goes to the movies and sees a couple having sex before bringing a grizzled waiter back to her room. Ester, who appears to be dying of TB, lies around in self-disgust, half-drunk and feverish. She's the erudite aesthete of the two, but there really isn't a spirit/flesh dichotomy to their characters inasmuch as they are both victims of, well, phallogocentrism in different ways.
In my second-favorite scene, Ana leaves the movie theater and is caught in a tide of men on the sidewalk. She's dizzy and with a war approaching there's a weird combination of tension and an absence of tension on the street. It's sort of an inverted foreplay; war operates as a torturous tease, an inability to find release or ejaculate. And phallic symbols abound: writing implements, a tube of lipstick, a tank's gun swiveling aimlessly in a city square--that last one, especially, embodies the exquisite unpleasure of being locked permanently at the moment just before release.
There are only a few other characters, a concierge/bellman/room service waiter who seems to be running the near-empty hotel by himself and a troupe of performing little people. The hotelier is tall and elderly, with protruding teeth and thick black glasses. Like the performers, he's grotesque in the literal sense. But he's profoundly kind, comforting Ester in her delirious discomfort (my favorite scene) and offering Johan half a bar of chocolate.
As the adult characters seldom speak, his uncomprehending but nearly nonstop chatter highlights the silence at the center of discourse. This is a film about the inability of any two people in a godless universe to communicate, how trying to get through is futile. Any sensitivity to or suffering from the subsequent alienation of this reality can drive people into misguided and increasingly desperate attempts to connect in ever-more spectacular or sensational ways. Fucking a stranger is as moral or amoral as withdrawing to the solitude of your bed.
Minimum Wage Bill Filibustered
In the category of "giant episodes of scandalous hypocrisy that aren't worth your attention because how Nancy Pelosi is inept and Communist and that's what we should focus on," the Senate voted 54-43 in favor of raising the minimum wage to the titanic, everything's-better-now rate of $7.25 an hour.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to placate the conservative demands that the haute bourgeoisie get something, too. They filibustered it. Remember when it used to be that House Republicans were crazy and their Senate counterparts were a tad more mature? Also, remember last year when the Democrats threatened to filibuster Bush's most egregious court nominees, the extreme conservatives who in some cases were "not qualified" according to the American Bar Association? And the "nuclear option" proposed by Bill Frist, to do away with filibustering altogether? And the extraordinary display of "bipartisanship" exercised by the Gang of Fourteen, who essentially adopted the Republicans' desires and repackaged them as "working together for you, the people"?
If you earn the minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, and put in a 40-hour week every single week of the year, you will earn--gross--$10,712, in the land of opportunity. Rather than ameliorate that humiliating factoid about our country, Senate Republicans used the same tactic they threatened to abolish when confronted over their ambition to remake our judicial landscape under the stewardship of archconservatives who aren't even good at their job. And they did it three weeks into their tenure as the minority. And nobody's pointing this out.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to placate the conservative demands that the haute bourgeoisie get something, too. They filibustered it. Remember when it used to be that House Republicans were crazy and their Senate counterparts were a tad more mature? Also, remember last year when the Democrats threatened to filibuster Bush's most egregious court nominees, the extreme conservatives who in some cases were "not qualified" according to the American Bar Association? And the "nuclear option" proposed by Bill Frist, to do away with filibustering altogether? And the extraordinary display of "bipartisanship" exercised by the Gang of Fourteen, who essentially adopted the Republicans' desires and repackaged them as "working together for you, the people"?
If you earn the minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, and put in a 40-hour week every single week of the year, you will earn--gross--$10,712, in the land of opportunity. Rather than ameliorate that humiliating factoid about our country, Senate Republicans used the same tactic they threatened to abolish when confronted over their ambition to remake our judicial landscape under the stewardship of archconservatives who aren't even good at their job. And they did it three weeks into their tenure as the minority. And nobody's pointing this out.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Bush unhinged
According to Condi, it's not 'escalation,' it's an 'augmentation.' Just because 68% of the country doesn't think it's a good idea, the decider will keep on deciding, after much deliberation and lengthy consultation with the cooler heads in our government, no doubt.
The writers of Left Behind love to mock diplomacy as the province for effeminate, Francophile boys to prance around behind elaborate protocols and never actually do anything, but I wonder just how much hollering we'll hear over Condi's latest boilerplate from, you know, National Review or something.
(An interesting tidbit: Jonah Goldberg, one of the biggest neocon assholes, is three weeks away from losing his $1000 bet, waged in Febr. 2005 against liberal blogger Juan Cole--who is smart and fluent in Arabic--that in two years, Iraq wouldn't be caught in civil war and both Iraqis and Americans would reach a broad conensus that the US war had been worth it).
It's altogether too tempting to imagine the inside of the president's head. Psychoanalysis comes easy. But seriously--what is going on over there? Against the white noise of 'we're listening to your conversations, 'we open your mail,' 'Jose Padilla...did...something,' and all the thousand other high crimes known and unknown, almost no one's backing his baby anymore--not even a majority in Utah. It doesn't take a genius to know that George H. W. Bush has agonized for years over what point does his intervention become goddamn necessary (but big deal, he's rich and practically dead). Obviously, the newly canonized Gerald Ford (ah, for the days when your president was really, really nice) was holding his tongue till it was a posthumous tongue. Nonetheless, there is still a constellation of true believers--a bipartisan coalition if one counts the Connecticut for Lieberman party.
Is this really supposed to be John McCain's war? Is the man who bussed himself all around the country crowing about integrity going to crucify himself in 2008 by taking on this burden--just to gain access to Bush's vaunted fund-raising club? That's an incredible gamble. That fabled maverick, so utterly desperate to be president, will eat shit straight from the hand of the man who told South Carolina in 2000 that he had a black baby, swinging the primary to Bush. The storied POW, the even-keeled skeptic, straight-talking Arizonan--he's toeing the party line to the point of pure absurdity.
Does anyone think 'winning' is possible? Does the Iraqi civil war have a dynamic where victory is achievable for any side? Iraq is like the Lebanon in 1975: 15 more years of war to go, followed by a painful and turgid peace plus de facto Syrian domination. If Iraq doesn't partition itself, which it should (at least for the fucking Kurds' benefit), it will merely hobble into the next paradigm change of power relations in the Middle East: oillessness. Whenever that is, 2050 or beyond. We've fucked Iraq over fourth-dimensionally.
The scariest thing is the new momentum of the federal government under Bush's charge. With Vice President Cuckoo-Bananas still, against all reason, not having bowed out for (ahem) health concerns even though he's ten times the ineptocrat that Donald Rumsfeld ever was, it's hard to believe we have two years and a week left of this shit. Bush et al. simply do whatever they want; that's the essence of the signing statements and the sweeping assumption of powers: "I can do whatever I want." In the end, Bush is the ultimate rich kid, never having had to be responsible for a single thing. He's a brat. No one has ever told him no, and now he's refigured the parameters of the world's most powerful office precisely so that no one can ever tell him no until January 20, 2009.
And now, in total and complete contravention of prudence and public opinion (in rare alignment) the traitor-baiters are actually condemning more overworked soldiers to die for their catastrophic error. They actually are. People are heading back to Iraq, some of them, for the third time. That's two fewer tours of duty than Dick Cheney's draft deferments. I suspect most of those people aren't heading back willingly, although you can't neglect the myrmidon factor. We're sending more people to die, for no good reason. Making sure that the ones who died already "didn't die in vain" qualifies as a shitty reason.
This is probably what animated so much anti-Nixon vitriol, around 1968-70, before Watergate; people had the sense that, for the first time since 1933, the government broadly did not give a shit and was actually behaving in even more ways contrary to
the country's best interests (to put it mildly). In 2007, still stinging after losing both chambers of Congress, Bush has decided it's a good idea to augment the war by sending more people to Iraq in order to hasten victory, and many of the Republican signers-on to this idea want to deploy more soldiers to make it possible to withdraw them.
The real answer is immediate withdrawal. There is nothing more than can be done for Iraq, because "Iraq" contains too many people bent on killing each other, not enough of which can be blamed on ancient blood feuds among sects to exculpates our blundering naivete for having gone there in the first place. We need to start leaving tomorrow, at the fastest possible speed, slowing only enough so that those physically boarding planes are protected by those who have not yet been lucky enough to leave for home.
The writers of Left Behind love to mock diplomacy as the province for effeminate, Francophile boys to prance around behind elaborate protocols and never actually do anything, but I wonder just how much hollering we'll hear over Condi's latest boilerplate from, you know, National Review or something.
(An interesting tidbit: Jonah Goldberg, one of the biggest neocon assholes, is three weeks away from losing his $1000 bet, waged in Febr. 2005 against liberal blogger Juan Cole--who is smart and fluent in Arabic--that in two years, Iraq wouldn't be caught in civil war and both Iraqis and Americans would reach a broad conensus that the US war had been worth it).
It's altogether too tempting to imagine the inside of the president's head. Psychoanalysis comes easy. But seriously--what is going on over there? Against the white noise of 'we're listening to your conversations, 'we open your mail,' 'Jose Padilla...did...something,' and all the thousand other high crimes known and unknown, almost no one's backing his baby anymore--not even a majority in Utah. It doesn't take a genius to know that George H. W. Bush has agonized for years over what point does his intervention become goddamn necessary (but big deal, he's rich and practically dead). Obviously, the newly canonized Gerald Ford (ah, for the days when your president was really, really nice) was holding his tongue till it was a posthumous tongue. Nonetheless, there is still a constellation of true believers--a bipartisan coalition if one counts the Connecticut for Lieberman party.
Is this really supposed to be John McCain's war? Is the man who bussed himself all around the country crowing about integrity going to crucify himself in 2008 by taking on this burden--just to gain access to Bush's vaunted fund-raising club? That's an incredible gamble. That fabled maverick, so utterly desperate to be president, will eat shit straight from the hand of the man who told South Carolina in 2000 that he had a black baby, swinging the primary to Bush. The storied POW, the even-keeled skeptic, straight-talking Arizonan--he's toeing the party line to the point of pure absurdity.
Does anyone think 'winning' is possible? Does the Iraqi civil war have a dynamic where victory is achievable for any side? Iraq is like the Lebanon in 1975: 15 more years of war to go, followed by a painful and turgid peace plus de facto Syrian domination. If Iraq doesn't partition itself, which it should (at least for the fucking Kurds' benefit), it will merely hobble into the next paradigm change of power relations in the Middle East: oillessness. Whenever that is, 2050 or beyond. We've fucked Iraq over fourth-dimensionally.
The scariest thing is the new momentum of the federal government under Bush's charge. With Vice President Cuckoo-Bananas still, against all reason, not having bowed out for (ahem) health concerns even though he's ten times the ineptocrat that Donald Rumsfeld ever was, it's hard to believe we have two years and a week left of this shit. Bush et al. simply do whatever they want; that's the essence of the signing statements and the sweeping assumption of powers: "I can do whatever I want." In the end, Bush is the ultimate rich kid, never having had to be responsible for a single thing. He's a brat. No one has ever told him no, and now he's refigured the parameters of the world's most powerful office precisely so that no one can ever tell him no until January 20, 2009.
And now, in total and complete contravention of prudence and public opinion (in rare alignment) the traitor-baiters are actually condemning more overworked soldiers to die for their catastrophic error. They actually are. People are heading back to Iraq, some of them, for the third time. That's two fewer tours of duty than Dick Cheney's draft deferments. I suspect most of those people aren't heading back willingly, although you can't neglect the myrmidon factor. We're sending more people to die, for no good reason. Making sure that the ones who died already "didn't die in vain" qualifies as a shitty reason.
This is probably what animated so much anti-Nixon vitriol, around 1968-70, before Watergate; people had the sense that, for the first time since 1933, the government broadly did not give a shit and was actually behaving in even more ways contrary to
the country's best interests (to put it mildly). In 2007, still stinging after losing both chambers of Congress, Bush has decided it's a good idea to augment the war by sending more people to Iraq in order to hasten victory, and many of the Republican signers-on to this idea want to deploy more soldiers to make it possible to withdraw them.
The real answer is immediate withdrawal. There is nothing more than can be done for Iraq, because "Iraq" contains too many people bent on killing each other, not enough of which can be blamed on ancient blood feuds among sects to exculpates our blundering naivete for having gone there in the first place. We need to start leaving tomorrow, at the fastest possible speed, slowing only enough so that those physically boarding planes are protected by those who have not yet been lucky enough to leave for home.
Children of Men
For no reason at all, I imagined this film to resemble Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf: subtle, disturbing, irresolved and quietly intense. It was instead more of a big-budget action movie whose art director consulted the dystopian literary canon for wisps of indie credibility. That probably sounds very disparaging, but this film was closer to that hot mess, V for Vendettathan I'd hoped.
All the same, a lot of the detail was striking. Beginning with the premise, two decades of infertility coinciding with and contributing to nuclear war, the permanent suspension of civil liberties (oh no), etc, is novel. I liked the lack of an explanation, although that did not imply a lack of exposition: characters swap sob-stories about when they first realized the world was going to hell, and the yellowed headlines papering a terrorist cell's hideout, while a nice visual, were too melancholic and backward-looking to be altogether believable. In other words, this movie succumbed to the near-universal affliction among dystopias, which is for characters rehash conversations and events that would have become, by the time of the movie according to the narrative's own chronology, ancient history. (New Yorkers just don't talk about Sept. 11 all the time). But that's just Hollywood's heavy hand, broadening the appeal.
Back to the good things. The symbol of the crown, so anachronistic and fainly embarrassing to many Brits, gets a steely update and serves as the focal point for the UK's self-hagiographic survival skills. Surveillance cameras along back-country roads are hot shit (as it were). The Ark of the Arts--I don't know; kind of ridiculous (although the truly inexplicable inclusion of an injured, possibly psychologically scarred boy playing a video game with wires under his fingernails is awesome). My favorite image was the sight (through a car window!) of a marching band and exotic animals on some sort of royal parade ground--it's crypto-imperialist, grotesque and somehow fascist, but without the obviousness of, say, "Big Brother is Watching You." Rampant toxic waste doesn't really make sense, but it was gross--as were fields of dead animals and people, burning--the spiritual pollution of the beloved English countryside.
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants don't really hold up, either (Europe's low birth rates already force it to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year), but that's missing the point. The point--emphasized by radio deejay chatter, character backstories and lots of other details--is that the industrialized west may have already hit a point where a precipitating crisis (be it total infertility or anything else) will necessarily trigger a cascading series of actions and reactions leading only to a brutal and aesthetically hideous police state that dominates the media by fear and executes patently absurd policies. What stupider way to combat depopulation than by launching into xenophobic overdrive?
Along with V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later, there's a common theme of British anxiety in the age of terrorism or even just globalization. Always an island of relative stability, never been invaded in almost a thousand years, usually on the winning side of wars, a ghost of its former imperial self, a relatively tiny place that nonetheless gave birth to the world's lingua franca--still there's a streak of paranoia, over infection by disease (see Mary Shelley's The Last Man, or the laws quarantining all pets for six months before entry, to keep the UK free of rabies) or being entrapped by a futuristic fascism enforced by the isolation of being borderless and off to one side of Europe. A totalitarian government that can seal everyone in and manipulate the media to portray the rest of the world as having fallen into chaos is a fear peculiarly strong in Britain, judging by three recent post-apocalyptic films.
****
All the same, a lot of the detail was striking. Beginning with the premise, two decades of infertility coinciding with and contributing to nuclear war, the permanent suspension of civil liberties (oh no), etc, is novel. I liked the lack of an explanation, although that did not imply a lack of exposition: characters swap sob-stories about when they first realized the world was going to hell, and the yellowed headlines papering a terrorist cell's hideout, while a nice visual, were too melancholic and backward-looking to be altogether believable. In other words, this movie succumbed to the near-universal affliction among dystopias, which is for characters rehash conversations and events that would have become, by the time of the movie according to the narrative's own chronology, ancient history. (New Yorkers just don't talk about Sept. 11 all the time). But that's just Hollywood's heavy hand, broadening the appeal.
Back to the good things. The symbol of the crown, so anachronistic and fainly embarrassing to many Brits, gets a steely update and serves as the focal point for the UK's self-hagiographic survival skills. Surveillance cameras along back-country roads are hot shit (as it were). The Ark of the Arts--I don't know; kind of ridiculous (although the truly inexplicable inclusion of an injured, possibly psychologically scarred boy playing a video game with wires under his fingernails is awesome). My favorite image was the sight (through a car window!) of a marching band and exotic animals on some sort of royal parade ground--it's crypto-imperialist, grotesque and somehow fascist, but without the obviousness of, say, "Big Brother is Watching You." Rampant toxic waste doesn't really make sense, but it was gross--as were fields of dead animals and people, burning--the spiritual pollution of the beloved English countryside.
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants don't really hold up, either (Europe's low birth rates already force it to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year), but that's missing the point. The point--emphasized by radio deejay chatter, character backstories and lots of other details--is that the industrialized west may have already hit a point where a precipitating crisis (be it total infertility or anything else) will necessarily trigger a cascading series of actions and reactions leading only to a brutal and aesthetically hideous police state that dominates the media by fear and executes patently absurd policies. What stupider way to combat depopulation than by launching into xenophobic overdrive?
Along with V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later, there's a common theme of British anxiety in the age of terrorism or even just globalization. Always an island of relative stability, never been invaded in almost a thousand years, usually on the winning side of wars, a ghost of its former imperial self, a relatively tiny place that nonetheless gave birth to the world's lingua franca--still there's a streak of paranoia, over infection by disease (see Mary Shelley's The Last Man, or the laws quarantining all pets for six months before entry, to keep the UK free of rabies) or being entrapped by a futuristic fascism enforced by the isolation of being borderless and off to one side of Europe. A totalitarian government that can seal everyone in and manipulate the media to portray the rest of the world as having fallen into chaos is a fear peculiarly strong in Britain, judging by three recent post-apocalyptic films.
****
Monday, January 01, 2007
Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"
Aside from White Teeth, this might be my favorite novel of the twenty-first century. (Now that we're seven years into it, that's no longer such a frivolous comment). I've never read any McCarthy before, and I've always thought of him as a writer for old men who read Hemingway while he was still alive and fantasized about fishing with him in Cuba. (Take that value-neutrally).
The Road is by far the best post-apocalyptic narrative I've ever read. And it leaks onto the page itself: the typography omits quotations marks, apostrophes and, in a lot of places, commas--all without appearing cutesy or self-consciously 'experimental.' The central motif of the book is ash. It's never explained how the world ended, but there was some sort of war which led to fires sweeping through the entire continent, killing many of the survivors and causing a downward spiral in which people were unable to feed themselves and resorted to cannibalism, which produced such a climate of terror that whoever was left retreated into isolation to survive, making any efforts at collective survival impossible. The fires and subsequent extinction of species reached critical mass, causing nearly all plant life and the oceans to die and making the earth rainy and cold all the time. And everything is covered in ash and dust. A father and son, who are almost certainly not actually related, travel south out of desperation and the need to remain active. They're starving.
There really isn't much of a plot, per se. They don't talk much, either. What makes this novel so incredible is the way in which they combat both the terrible pointlessness and total fear, reduced to eating rotted fruit and sleeping under tarps in the freezing rain. Often the father decides against a fire, in the event that marauders kill and devour him and his adopted son in the night. At one point, they come upon a house and find, in the basement, dozens of people locked in the dark awaiting the hour when their captors will eat them. That's just about the worst image I can think of.
While it's one of the more exceptionally jarring, the entire book is a tense study of narrative anti-inertia. McCarthy never lets up, but his touch is light, adroit. He's an exceptionally good writer who never succumbs to melodrama, and the ending, while ambiguously happy, doesn't stray. In our comfort we can imagine visceral horrors about what it would be like to remain alive after everyone else died, with the birds and the grass gone, too. That tradition is long and good, if shot through with a lameass streak of spirituality. But McCarthy's book basically owns up to the fact that there's no such thing as God--an oddly uncommon gesture--while eliminating the one other repository of hope: good dreams when your waking life is a catalog of despair. The father tells the son that although bad dreams are brutally unfair, it's important to keep having them because if they stop that means you've begun to give up. That's as ingenious as it is awful to hear. I cried.
The Road is by far the best post-apocalyptic narrative I've ever read. And it leaks onto the page itself: the typography omits quotations marks, apostrophes and, in a lot of places, commas--all without appearing cutesy or self-consciously 'experimental.' The central motif of the book is ash. It's never explained how the world ended, but there was some sort of war which led to fires sweeping through the entire continent, killing many of the survivors and causing a downward spiral in which people were unable to feed themselves and resorted to cannibalism, which produced such a climate of terror that whoever was left retreated into isolation to survive, making any efforts at collective survival impossible. The fires and subsequent extinction of species reached critical mass, causing nearly all plant life and the oceans to die and making the earth rainy and cold all the time. And everything is covered in ash and dust. A father and son, who are almost certainly not actually related, travel south out of desperation and the need to remain active. They're starving.
There really isn't much of a plot, per se. They don't talk much, either. What makes this novel so incredible is the way in which they combat both the terrible pointlessness and total fear, reduced to eating rotted fruit and sleeping under tarps in the freezing rain. Often the father decides against a fire, in the event that marauders kill and devour him and his adopted son in the night. At one point, they come upon a house and find, in the basement, dozens of people locked in the dark awaiting the hour when their captors will eat them. That's just about the worst image I can think of.
While it's one of the more exceptionally jarring, the entire book is a tense study of narrative anti-inertia. McCarthy never lets up, but his touch is light, adroit. He's an exceptionally good writer who never succumbs to melodrama, and the ending, while ambiguously happy, doesn't stray. In our comfort we can imagine visceral horrors about what it would be like to remain alive after everyone else died, with the birds and the grass gone, too. That tradition is long and good, if shot through with a lameass streak of spirituality. But McCarthy's book basically owns up to the fact that there's no such thing as God--an oddly uncommon gesture--while eliminating the one other repository of hope: good dreams when your waking life is a catalog of despair. The father tells the son that although bad dreams are brutally unfair, it's important to keep having them because if they stop that means you've begun to give up. That's as ingenious as it is awful to hear. I cried.
