I love this shit

Not only does Colin Powell deliver eloquent reasons for why Obama is a “transformational figure” who will be an “excellent president” in this clip, he calls out the Republican party leadership, their constituency, and the McCain campaign for their racist smear campaign in the most cunning way. Watching this clip reminds me how patient (or quiescent) Obama and the rest of America, and especially people of color, have been during the last few weeks of McCain’s campaign. It’s almost as though the McCain people forgot that there are other people of color in the U.S. besides Obama, and that other people vote besides anti-Muslim racists with a pathological fear of terrorism. Colin Powell comes out of left field (or is that right-center?) and refutes the entire logic of the McCain ticket since the choice of Sarah Palin. Hopefully this endorsement will shock the system of undecided voters and get them out to vote for Obama-Biden.

Broadway Needle Exchange

Am I sick/cynical/stupid to find something weird about this headline from the front page of nytimes.com? “Rudy Giuliani has staked his campaign on the idea that he will keep America safe from terror the same way he kept New York City safe from crime — with ruthless efficiency.” Yet he didn’t keep NY safe from terror . . . Not that I’m saying he could have. Nobody did and nobody probably could have, him especially. If anything, it speaks again to the absurdity of “war on terror” rhetoric.

Nausea

This is by far the most nauseating news story I have read this year. Not disturbing. Not upsetting. Just nauseating. And it’s not even as though I think press stories like this distract from “bigger issues.” This is the issue — what it means to be human today. This is why the Sex Pistols wrote “God Save the Queen” exactly 30 years ago. Have we evolved at all? Moz says “no.” (Skip to verse three, about 1:30 in, if you’re not a Morrissey fan.) And as for the President . . .

The DJ Drama Controversy

Here’s a link to the lenghty NY Times article on DJ Drama’s arrest.  The article is painfully straightforward, but fills in most of the facts of the case.  This is probably the biggest musical development so far this year, far more significant than any actual music that has been released, which is a semi-tragic thing to say, but them’s the vicissitudes of the insane musical economy in which we’re living right now.

Pan’s Labyrinth, War, etc.

So I really shouldn’t be writing now, I have a lot of reading to do, but I did want to chime in on a couple things and just keep my blogging muscles toned during this, the second week of class.

On Friday night I saw Pan’s Labyrinth. I really didn’t expect to dig it — a prestige picture from a heretofore work-a-day director (to my knowledge), a fantasy script, what looked to be a naive dabbling in fascism, politics, “magical realism,” the surreal. Certainly, the film was all these things — I don’t think that my expectations were wrong — but it also worked for me on these levels. My fear as I entered the film was that I’m actually interested in these topics, so it easily could have made only a few missteps and been a great disappointment for me.

It’s not a masterpiece, which is what I think some critics have been calling it. In fact, to my mind, it was a modest accomplishment. It was, basically, I thought, a creepy sort of meditation on the aesthetics of fascism, the story that fascism tells about itself or has told about itself. The special effects were employed to worthwhile ends and some of the imagery was impressively faithful to a native Iberian surrealist style, namely Dali.

Less so from this perspective, from its place in an Hispanic cultural tradition, but more so from the point of view of coping with or working through an historical trauma, I wondered if the film would resonate more in the eyes of a Spanish viewer. I imagine it would. It was refreshing to see a WWII movie, or at least, a movie at one remove from WWII, not set on the German side or the Amerikan, not focusing solely upon the slaughter of mechanized warfare or on the Holocaust, but on how that war also exterminated a set of folkways and traditions, a whole sort of worldview embodied, in the film, by the imagination of the young heroine or the spirit of the communist freedom fighters. Especially with this latter element, I couldn’t help but wax sentimental for other stories of Spain, the Civil War, and fascism from an Anglo-American perspective — For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalunya — both favorite books of mine. Even though this association is clearly out of context, it still increased my enjoyment of the film. Recommended.

I also feel the need to reflect a little on the State of the Union. I forget if I’ve written on this yet. At any rate, I’ll keep it brief. In fact, I won’t write much at all except to say that I grow more disappointed every day that an anti-war movement is so slow in organizing itself in opposition to this war. When will we take to the streets? When will we form a counterculture? This question especially to me seems so vital. Late last night they were running some low-budget documentary on the 60s here in Charlottesville. I didn’t even watch it even though it looked as though it featured some cool interviews, but the brief bit that I did see reminded me that the staidness and conservatism of contemporary youth culture is a major impediment to the development of an anti-authoritarian social movement of any kind, and if the United States needs anything right now it is anti-authoritarian political agitation. I don’t think that democracy is dead in this country or as a political ideology, but it is time to recognize that in the United States the powers-that-be are acting wrecklessly and irresponsibility in a nearly dictatorial fashion. The Bush White House has no mandate for the actions that it is taking, actions which I fear will inevitably lead to some sort of low-scale military conflict with Iran in the not too distant future, and then we’re even further down the proverbial rabbit hole than we are right now. Since it’s too late to counter these actions in the polling booth, we must take to the streets, but we won’t without a dense and robust network of social, cultural, and political discourse. From my perspective, culture, as I say counter-culture, is the always missing element.

And one further small point that might unwittingly set this post to rights. I also heard that weirdo Tony Blankley on The McLaughlin Group this weekend say that Washington has nothing to fear from an anti-war movement because of how the Internet dissipates political energies. I definitely agree with this thesis in part, and I think I may try to explore it further in coming posts. Comments welcome and encouraged.

Springfield in the news

I think The Office is a rerun tonight, but I’m going to watch it anyway, but before I do here’s a link to an article in the New York Times about my hometown, Springfield, and my dad’s hometown, Clifton Heights. Most Springfield readers probably already know this, but I should also mention that the Rocco Polidoro quoted in the first paragraph is a family friend. I haven’t read the article yet myself, in toto, so I don’t really have any further comment on it, but it’s certainly an interesting piece of Springfield trivia. Don’t ya think?

President Bush’s Speech

I still plan on getting to the year in review stuff eventually.  In fact, putting the idea out there has given me a chance to organize some of my thoughts privately before I air them here for all to see.  So consider yourself lucky. Or warned.

Instead of posting the year in review stuff tonight, I’m going to comment a bit on the speech that President Bush delivered this evening.  I knew that it would be painful to watch, but I also felt like I was somehow obligated to watch it, so I grinned and bore it.  On an aesthetic, emotional level, as a gut check, it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  In fact, ever since the last election, I haven’t found the Bush ‘persona,’, or what we might better call his presentation all that galling.  Certainly, this is a matter of fatigue on my part, but like anyone in his position, I think that he has at least toned down his hubris somewhat, however infinitesimally, and that has made at least some difference to me.

The speech was somewhat honest.  I found the following section the most affecting:

“[Our troops in Iraq] have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

When I first heard this, my response was quite visceral.  Immediately, it felt like a pose that I’ve never seen or heard Bush strike before–repentance, remorse, responsibility, guilt–the simple admission that one has made a mistake.  But of course, reviewing the text now, I realize that it wasn’t quite that.  As Mark Shields pointed out in his immediate response to the speech on PBS, “mistakes have been made” is Washington double-talk designed to displace blame.

Still, Bush’s tone was sober, and the strategy he presented for escalating the invasion of Iraq was, at least, not as vague as feared (though this is not really a good thing either).  Nevertheless, it was obfuscating–a mask–though this mask is thin and attenuated.  The president’s big lie is damaged and fraying.  Fatigue has set in–fatigue towards the war, towards the presidential persona, towards the politics of fear.  Does anyone buy the War on Terror rhetoric anymore? These days it almost seems as though it would be in Al Qaeda’s best interests not to attack the United States so that the War on Terror rhetoric will seem like more and more of a fraud to the American people and perhaps convince them to take their own action against their falsifying government.

It is difficult to see, but it is obvious that what Bush is talking about here is expanding the war effort, escalating the war effort.  This is really what he’s asking for–a tenuous mandate of silence.  He’s playing politics, so I will too.  I hate to sound like a Democrat here, because I know that this is the counter-spin that they’re posting up against Bush and his cronies’ preferred “troop surge,” but “expanding the war” is, in my opinion, a phrase to get behind.  It is the truth. (Note: The president doesn’t actually mention troop surge in the speech so I wonder if that’s already been taken out of circulation.)

From my perspective, with today’s speech, the United States government’s invasion of Iraq has come to resemble their invasion of Vietnam more than ever before. Of course, this development is a totally horrible thing for the people living in Iraq and for the soldiers attacking them.  But if the resemblance has a good side effect it might be, finally, to bring the utter brutality of war, all war, home to American citizens and perhaps inspire them to attempt, more forcefully, to put a stop to this invasion and all future invasions.  I visited Vietnam and Cambodia two years ago (and the former Yugoslavia the year before that), and to see the scars of war in these countries is to forever know that the mediated presentation of a sanitized war, a rational war, a just war, is an out and out lie and distortion.  I will be thinking of this fact as I watch and read of American soldiers going from door to door in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, not creating a peace, or securing a peace (there is none to be had!) but fighting a war, a war, I will have you note, that never came up in President Bush’s speech.  As he would have us believe, no war is being fought in Iraq (besides the war on terror, mentioned once, early on, in passing).  But of course it is.  And a wider war is being sought, and this, for the moment, we can only mourn.

(P.S. Some of my thoughts on this post were inspired by Phil Ochs’s song “We Seek No Wider War,” which was scrolling through my head throughout the entire speech.  I would quote it, but it’s difficult to pick up on its irony without reading through the entire thing, so here’s a link to the lyrics: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/we-seek-no-wider-war.html  Or better yet, download it somewhere.)

Communist Manifesto Cartoon

Dig it! I like this not just for the cartoon, but because it encourages you to just listen to the manifesto again. Brilliant!

Populism: A Scatterbrained Blog

I was impressed today by the NYT’s on-line lead story “Incoming Democrats Put Populism Before Ideology”. It impressed me for two reasons. One, I am currently attending the Film & History league Conference in Dallas, Texas where I delivered a paper on Michael Moore’s populism, politics, and paranoia. Nearly every one of the panels I have attended here on recent documentaries has touched on the wave of populist rhetoric, politics, affect that have been sweeping the U.S. Two, I am reading Ernesto Laclau’s latest On Populist Reason, which extends his critique of populism begun in such books as Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, and with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

I am only a couple chapters into Laclau’s book, but what he seems to be getting at is that populism is more a desire than anything else, but it is also all those other things I mention above–rhetoric, politics, affect. What does this mean? Well, any political movement can basically be described as populist. In a basic sense, because every political movement involves a people. Beyond this, every political movement also assumes certain political desires on the part of its people, psychological or affective positions which, strictly speaking, fall outside of the realm of traditional political discourse a la Aristotle, the founding fathers, and perhaps even Marx and his descendants.

So when the Times says that Dems are putting populism ahead of ideology the statement only makes rhetorical sense in the realm of language and argument, no real sense in the world of politics and things. I realize this is all very complicated. I’m still working out the details myself. Perhaps a real-world example will help . . .

The last time there was a shift in control of congressional politics was 1994 when the Gingrich Republicans took over. The Gingrinch program may be accurately described as an “ideologization” of the Right, and a possible re-ideologization of American politics generally. (These ideas come from Dana Nelson and Tyler Curtain’s dialogue in the collection Our Monica, Ourselves.) What does this mean? Well, before Gingrich, since the late 1800s the Republican party was purely a party of privilege, that is, corporatist, statist, and pro-business. It had no real ideological platform except for the Zen-like “Going with the flow of the market.” Gingrich brought ideology into the mix by instead building a platform for the Republicans.  This involved adopteing the politics of hate paired with financial austerity and an abandonment of social programs, i.e.it was  pro-white, anti-gay, anti-female, anti-welfare, pro-business, pro-war, isolationist, nationalist, etc. Despite the program’s utter irrationality on paper, and American politics’s reputed rationality, the program appealed to our desire for two reasons, 1) because of its heated, hateful elements, 2) because it constituted a set of beliefs, i.e. a platform, which could be taken or left, not simply an affective stance like Clinton sought. If Clinton had had a program, it would have been a direct descendant from New Deal and Great Society social welfare programs, popular programs unbeneficial to the rich.

The populist dems, as the Times describes them, are comparably politically weak when compared with both the Clinton dems and the Gingrich Republicans since they lack both a political platform (“We’re better than the other guys”), and because they run a greater risk of alienating the public on an emotional or affective level. Why this latter? Well, because the dems are unlikely to end the Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on Terror without massive losses in blood and treasure either to the U.S., its allies, or the occupied nations, or a large-scale spread in terrorist activity (NB: This wouldn’t have happened if the wars hadn’t been started in the first place.  A paradox that only seems like a paradox.). Universal healthcare reform seems more possible now, but it still a distant goal and will probably result in class warfare before reform. The dems have no response to the problems of the disenfranchised or the poor.

And this last is what really stood out for me in the Times article. Since all these dems got elected not because they are authentic, clever, or driven, but merely not the other guy, they are unlike the other guy in all categories but one, their relative wealth and privilege in comparison to the rest of the United States population. These are not political leaders in the traditional sense, i.e. charismatic, auratic figures, but rich men and women–doctors and lawyers, pseudo-celebrities, former sports players, businesspeople, captains of industry, etc. Is this the real face of democracy? Perhaps. But I also wonder whether or not it is also the face of a nation starving, unsated by the blood of its imperial adventures abroad.

Reflections on the Election in a Flash

I don’t have much time to write. In fact, I have no time at all. Flying to Dallas tomorrow to deliver the much revised part of my M.A. thesis on Fahrenheit 9/11. Still much more revising to be done, which is pitiful, but I’ve been so busy this semester.

Still, I wanted to chime in briefly on the election. I’m very happy with the results. Virginia is still undecided, but looking dem, hopefully. My home state PA went hard dem. Santorum was voted out. For a pro-lifer, sure, but I’ll take a sexist over an out and out racist, homophobic bigot any day, and my hometown, Springfield, voted out Curt Weldon, which is exciting. It will feel much more inviting when I go home there for the holidays this year. I don’t know much about the new congressman, Joe Sestak, he could be a chump, but this election was largely symbolic, as I see it, like all U.S. elections really, and the symbolism here was encouraging. And it seems as though maybe Bush and his cronies are getting this, this symbolism, these signs of the times, too. They are apocalypticists after all. Rumsfeld’s resignation today caused me to raise my arms in triumph, but it’s scary too. Large shifts in power should always be approached warily, especially when they are more so symbolic and will probably not have a great effect on policy.

Late last night I saw some pundit on CBS saying that, if anything, these election results are a sign that Americans are angry. I think that’s true, and it’s encouraging in one way, and scary in another. It’s good to know that Americans are fed up with business as usual, that they’ve finally broken through the slimy skin and teflon wardrobe of president Bush and his cabinet, which so deceptively conceal their depraved and inhumane barbarity. But anger is always a dangerous political emotion. If the democrats should not be able to turn the ebb tide of barbarity, at home and abroad, then I fear that the flood tides of reaction will return upon us ever stronger and more ferociously.

If they can’t do it, then the multitude might have to, and in that case, I foresee a possible social upheaval in the U.S. on a scale so massive as to dwarf the ideologically fraught and unduly romanticized struggles of the 60s. The dems are in power, but can they harness it and to what ends, and will this really satisfy the anger of a population impressed into service on the losing side of the total war that is everyday life under terror capital?