Mise en cinema

There's a great post over at IO9 about why these fake films within films are great (ostensibly because their absurd nature and obvious badness would deter anyone from making films like these...) Aside from the CG being bad and it being generally hackneyed, there is something disconcerting about this clip:

George Simmons in "Re-Do" from Justin Long

The Evolution of a Muppet

In the late fifties and early sixties Henson was hired to do these commercials for Wilkins coffee. I'm not sure these are any less disturbing than the Wachowski-esque video game violence of modern television and cinema. For your viewing pleasure:

Enterainment Tonight, sorta

For those of you who haven't seen it. And for those that forget, here's the younger Phoenix brother doing his best Andy Kaufman:



Here's the thing about Phoenix, I think he's staging this whole thing. I think he's going to meltdown his career, grab a bun ch of headlines as a lunatic, then whatever. My only problem is that I read a while ago that he's having a friend film this entire thing for a documentary(?). Welcome to the desert of the real, my friends.

Rebranding and Misdirection in the McCain Campaign

There are 22 days left until we vote for the next President of the United States. As the summer wore on, the leaves changed color and we transitioned into autumn, we have seen both campaigns wage at times ugly and misleading fight over the primary battleground in U.S. politics: the media narrative. This is where the Right Wing political machine has had the Left solidly beaten for quite some time. The Right has managed to define the discourse, while somehow creating a metadiscourse about how the media is an extension of Leftist ideology. While there is little evidence to support this, the term liberal media is so ubiquitous that it has become invisible; it is taken as a self-evident truth. The reality is that liberal or progressive ideology are not going to win this battleground. This not only because it is part of the American psyche that it is already been won by the Left, but also because progressives are diverse with variegated weltangschauung that makes having the kind of message discipline necessary to alter the media narrative difficult.

One small example is that the progressive attacks of Bush are that he is a bumbling, incompetent idiot whose speech is often malapropos and that he is part of an elite political dynasty with ties to corporate powerbrokers who control the machinery of our culture from the shadowy recesses of D.C. These two ideas, while not mutually exclusive, create cognitive dissonance that is (was) reconciled by taking Bush's gaffes and his image as Joe Sixpack on his "ranch" in Crawford, TX as the truth of the matter. There is a collective amnesia about Bush as the owner of an oil company or owner of a baseball team and a confirmation bias that reinforces the President as someone that a large number of Americans would like to have a beer with, as one of us, an unsophisticate who is one of the people. Maybe he would have been able to brand himself as the everyman if progressives could have stayed on message or maybe not, but it is a symptom of the problem that the left has.

This being said, now we have an inversion of this problem where Obama's campaign has managed to be rigorously disciplined in both message and its delivery. Obama has focused on the idea of change and hope, while at the same time having surrogates pursue lines of attack that would either muddle his message or dirty his hands. The McCain campaign, on the other hand, has seemed "erratic" and inconsistent vacillating from running a "maverick" campaign that would raise the level of political discourse to running a Rove-esque (thanks to his protege Steve Schmidt, who is McCain's campaign adviser and strategist) Swift-boat style attacks that inflame the collective fear of terrorism and play upon racial tensions that are largely invisible in Middle America. McCain's campaign has shown a lack of discipline that is coupled with the perception that it is disingenuous and desperate as it moves from one publicity stunt to another (Palin VP selection to the "suspension" of his campaign).

Here is where it gets interesting: McCain/Palin's polling numbers are terrible. Nate Silver and the guys at fivethirtyeight.com have Obama winning nearly 90% of the time. McCain has little to lose at this point, so playing the race card makes sense. It is an appeal to the working class, uneducated Clinton/Reagan "democrats" who are uncomfortable (which is being diplomatic...) with race, black men, Islam, or whatever The Other is. Now the thing is, the radicalization that is occurring at the rallies is reminiscent of what occurs when angry mobs of disenfranchised people are given license to express the devils of their basest nature. If McCain persisted in whipping the fears into a firestorm, then people would start explicitly drawing parallels to Nazi rallies, Klan rallies, or any of the many other examples that litter history. However, if he stops now and begins exhibiting message discipline as a "maverick" and straight talker who denounces the hate-mongering that his campaign has been perpetuating, he can position himself in a good place to win. By running an ugly campaign that reached a fevered pitch over the last couple of weeks, he has managed to embed in our collective psyches the potential that Obama is a terrorist, an unknown, a dangerous commodity with a middle name that elicits thoughts of Middle Eastern dictators.

If he starts campaigning "cleanly" and establishing himself as an agent of hope and optimism (taking a page from his opponents play book), then white voters can vote for him without guilt. He has reestablished Obama's race as part of the political narrative so that it reverberates around the media echo chamber. It has now been established that it is acceptable to be uncomfortable with Obama as an unknown, all that is left is for McCain to give the people a reason to vote for him. In the meantime, racial discourse (hell, all rational, civilized discourse) has been degraded as it has become acceptable to make billboards like the one above and for people to sell these at a conservative-sponsored summit:

I am trying to avoid attacking Palin or McCain's person, which I'm obviously not very good at. So, I'll let the subjects speak for themselves without any unnecessary commentary. For your viewing enjoyment:


It continues:


I want everyone in our country to see this. I want everyone to watch and listen to both of these candidates. If on November 5th they have been elected to lead this country, I am going to pull my hair out. While it is unimaginable that we will elect a black man to the highest office, it is becoming increasingly unfathomable that we will elect the McCain/Palin ticket. I don't know, but I fear for our future.

The Cult of Disinformation

Unless the Jolie-Pitt twins are conjoined, I fail to see why we care. After watching an hour of CNN yesterday, I fail to realize why we care about most of their "stories". The perfect example of this was the overwrought coverage of the SoCal earthquake. This was manufactures news - they kept talking about asking people to call in with mas o menos traumatic stories. The first hour was very thin as no one had anything exciting to say about the quake. Most people didn't even realize what was going on until it was over. Then, I suspect the people that did call in embellished their stories so they could be interviewed by Wolf Blitzer. The funny thing is that the coverage of the earthquake began right as Sen. Harry Reid was about to address the Stevens indictment. I watched for hours as CNN frantically covered a few broken dishes and the rides at Disneyland being temporarily shutdown while the longest serving Republican Senator was being indicted on corruption charges. The "news" is absolutely ridiculous. The coverage of the presidential campaign is equally insipid and equally frustrating...

The continuation of politics by other means: Part II

Blackwater is defined as wastewater containing bodily or other biological wastes, such as from toilets, kitchen sinks, etc. This is to be compared with graywater that is wastewater from household baths and washing machines that is recycled and used for gardening or flushing toilets.

An alternate definition of Blackwater is the private military company that is one the U.S. State Department’s three largest security contractors, which was founded by ex-Navy SEAL cum-millionaire Erik Prince who not only has all sorts of ties to the Republican Party, but is also is a board member of Christian Freedom International. Now I know it is a huge fallacy to extrapolate anything about the private security contractors on the ground in Iraq or their blatant disregard for the value of human life from the founder of the company’s apparent ideology, but I will say that it is amusing in a laugh-at-a-particularly –funny-Holocaust-joke-kind-of-way. Crusades, anyone?

The last definition that I am proffering today is hubris: excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance, which is from the Greek hybris meaning “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” originally “presumption toward the gods.” Now here’s the question: is it their hubris thinking that they can go into another country and kill and maim people indiscriminately without significant consequences or is it our hubris in that we are being presumptuous that the gods of commerce will hear or care about our moral outrage w/r/t what they do to preserve our way of life? More specifically, isn’t this moral outrage a little hollow when we continue to invest with groups such are JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity, and Capital Group/American Funds, which in turn are some of the largest U.S. investors in PetroChina, the public arm of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). So, as we feign moral outrage about mercenaries (let’s call these private security contractors what they are) indiscriminately using force against Iraqi citizens for perceived threats, we are feeding our IRAs, which in turn are being used to help fund the genocide in Sudan (our [well, not mine…restaurants do not help much in terms of retirement…] money goes into our IRAs, is then re-invested into PetroChina, then is in turn used by CNPC to operate the Greater Nile Petroleum Company, Sudan’s largest oil producer.)[1]

I know, I know, progress not perfection. We drive our cars to our rallies and protest about NAFTA or American Imperialism then go home feeling as if we’ve made some sort of difference. We write polemics in blogs that no one reads and less people care about that ultimately let us gain a moral neutral buoyancy so that we can sip our lattes and run our miles, but aren’t we really just assuaging our ubiquitous White Guilt? Does any of this really matter? Could we, even if we were willing to, extract ourselves from a significant percentage of the culture of oppression and domination of which we are integral parts? Everything we purchase and consume is the moral equivalent of a blood diamond. How do we resist? Stop consuming? Write our Congressmen? Blow up a dam?

It is funny, Nate challenged me to quit watching and reading about sports and he would in turn stop eating meat. I’ve found it more difficult than quitting smoking. How many other comforts will I have great difficulty giving up? Coffee? Rice? Fish? The Internet? Cable TV? Alcohol? Cell phone? Pornography in all of its many forms? As I sit here free-associating on my laptop that cost 1/15^th the estimated value of an Iraqi citizen’s life (at least according the State Departments Diplomatic Security Service) on my day off from a restaurant where people spend more on meal than I make in a week, I am at a total loss. I am not even angry anymore, only confused and depressed.

War is the continuation of the absence of politics by other means[2]; it is corporate sponsored states using force and propaganda to control the resources of those with less power. Mussolini said of Fascism that, “[it] should be more appropriately called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”[3] This brings to mind what might be “the central delusion of [our] culture, the delusion that there are rich and there are poor, that monetary wealth – and by extension food and land (which means food) – is held by anything more than social contract and force.”[4] We live in a world where we vote with our dollar and we are not really given any other choice. Freedom? “You can have all the freedom you want as long as the authorities consider it unimportant.” [5] Or at least so stated Ted Kaczynski. I doubt there can be any real freedom, much less democracy, in a capitalist state.

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[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/worldbusiness/30oil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[2] Eh, The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard

[3] Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, Derrick Jensen

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

The continuation of politics by other means: Part I

Embedded deep within our mass culture is the desire to see itself destroyed. Mostly unacknowledged, it is the desire to destroy the monolithic, unipolar structure (which the social and political aspects of mass culture are manifestations) that is the slowly accumulating more power. In consolidating power down to a singularity, it has subsumed all forms of rebellion up to the ultimate rebellion: death. These conditions have created a monolithic culture that is essentially committing suicide in that the only viable avenue of rebellion is both symbolic and incomprehensible in terms of the non-marginalized discourse. It is symbolic in that the acts of rebellion are not in themselves merely acts of rebellion, but they are terrorist acts, acts that by virtue of the mass culture’s monopoly on the discourse of rebellion require Others (outsiders, those who have been marginalized [either in perception or in reality – are these separable?] and are excluded from any other form of acceptable discourse) to change the rules, change the nature of the discourse of rebellion. So far, this seems to be achieved by the embracing and utilizing of death and the embracing and controlling the image-event.

Because we are unable to accept death in any form, but specifically when young men and women are sent to die in foreign countries (this is, among many other things, part of the scarring done by the Sixties and Vietnam), we find incomprehensible when men or women (children even more so) choose to use their deaths as a weapon, to make their individual deaths symbolic. We want a clean war, a war where we die as little as possible, where we are absolved in the end (which is quite often accomplished by victory). Our ideal is a war of technocratic superiority where cities are destroyed and death rains down from above, where we commit as few people as possible to the traditional concept of war where combatants meet on a battlefield and engage each other to the death. So, as everyone who has engaged in warfare since time immemorial, we have sought to use modern technology to limit our losses in the field, but we still hold that the enemy must meet us on this field, where we might show up after the “theater” has been “softened” from afar. Our enemies have taken to integrating themselves into the communities that we ostensibly seek to liberate in the vain hope that it will provide some safeguard, that we will not destroy “civilians”. What they do not realize is that the civilians are also the Others and that we do not care about those who are killed purposefully or inadvertently, which I suspect is due to a latent suspicion on our part that they are all guilty anyway. (Intuitively, I would guess that this feeling arises both from cultural and geographic distance [they are guilty for not being born here, they are guilty because they dress, eat, walk, and sing differently] and because they are necessarily the Other [non-Christian, non-Capitalist, non-White].) Still, the images of their deaths are limited as well; we accept that other people are dying as long as it does not interrupt the image-events, as long as we do not have to see it and therefore have some degree of culpability. We have made this problem of culpability a non-starter by removing from mass culture the reality of death and replacing it with at best simulacra and at worst image-events that allow for easy abstraction, digestion, or indifference.

It seems that we look upon all broadcast events equanimously, for they are not real, but are instead images of spectacles, which incidentally have become the inter-subjective agreement of what is real. This deluge of image-events through mass culture is rendered less concrete by their transience; no sooner is one exhibited, then it is replaced by another. The image-events are all morally equal: whether it is the “fiction” of cinema or television or the “reality” of broadcast news and print media, they occupy the same moral space as long as we are removed far enough from the spectacle. A friend of mine was living in Brooklyn on 9/11. He awoke as the planes where crashing into the towers. He turned on his television only to realize that he could see the event (the second plane crashing into the tower) occur outside his window. I have to wonder which view felt more real to him: the event framed by the window (much in the same way the event was framed by the television) must have been surreal, incomprehensible, or the view on the television made intelligible and thereby real by the ticker tape and captions to carefully lead him through the event. The view from the window afforded him no such luxury. It must have been an odd feeling to have an experience where one could choose between an unintelligible live event and a quasi-intelligible image-event. Ultimately, I think that we would choose (not only in this circumstance, but in most) the image-event and the simulacrum over the first hand experience of the event. If this is the case, then whoever controls the image-events controls inter-subjective agreement, social discourse, and ultimately, our shared reality.

We are all Germans

The thing that surprised me most about the concentration camp at Dachau was not that I was visiting a place where tens of thousands of people were murdered, or that I was confronted by throngs of teenagers, undoubtedly out on school trips (we did the same when I was young, except we visited museums commemorating the internment of Japanese and Asian Americans during WWII), or the ovens and how serene the setting was, or how one could walk along a wooded trail and come across plaques marking where people were lined up against the wall and executed. What surprised me most, and today I still have the hardest time reconciling, is that the city of Dachau comes right up to the walls of the concentration camp. In the shadow of these walls are townhouses and small yards with children’s toys not unlike ones you would find in Federal Way or any other suburb, the notable difference being the knowledge that on the other side was the most efficient concentration camp of the Holocaust: Dachau.

I wondered then and I wonder now, how did they live there? How did they stay as the ash from the ovens fell over the city? Moreover, how do they continue to live there with its dark history? It is an easy question to ask, and probably an even easier question to answer. As I write this from my apartment in Tacoma, WA, I look out my living room window at Mount Rainier from which this city gets its name. Originally “known as Tahoma or Tacoma, from the Puyallup word tacobet ("mother of waters"),”[i] the mountain has since been renamed Mount Rainier. It reminds me that my hometown, which I am particularly fond of and that I have a misplaced affinity for its blue collar sentimentality, is here because of conquest, Manifest Destiny, and genocide. Succinctly, I am here because of a holocaust. I can sit here and unflinchingly sing the praises of a town built because of the eradication of the indigenous people while simultaneously criticizing the people of Dachau. Now, there is a longer timeline here, so I can make claims to that the collective amnesia has had more time to set in, but really as I type this I hear Jen and Nate in my head calling shenanigans. We do not need time for the amnesia to set in, we turn our heads and ignore atrocities as they are committed. Hence, the amnesia is virtually instantaneous.

If Iraqi Body Count and its lack of publicity (though the fatalites of our soldiers, currently around 2400, gets plenty of press when it hits the arbitrary marks) is not enough for you, then take a look at the estimated casualties from UN sanctions against Iraq from the first Gulf War until the second: “Critics of the sanctions say that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of them, [2] although certain skeptics claim the numbers to be less. [3] [4][5] UNICEF has put the number of child deaths to 500,000.”[ii] The now famous quote from Madeleine Albright that “we think the price is worth it” pretty much sums up our culture’s feelings on the subject. That we are willing to strangle another country so that the impoverished die from disease, malnutrition, and starvation, is indicative of the fact that we value “the abstract over the particular: of production over life; of economic…systems over living beings.”[iii] We are unperturbed by the deaths of these people, mostly children. Is it because they are brown? Is it because they live on the other side of the planet? Or is it because “every holocaust looks different, depending on the class to which the observer belongs.”[iv] To the class benefitting from such atrocities, do they even appear to be such? Can we distinguish these atrocities from the tide of history, from the progress of civilization where the conquered are subjected to the whims of the conquerors? Maybe for the class benefitting “(t)he holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.”[v]

We have sites like Iraqi Body Count because there is something of interest in Iraq: oil. We are not overly concerned about the conflict Sudan, AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, much less human rights violations in China (Ramsey Clark, attorney general during LBJ’s administration, stated that the purpose of US foreign policy is “to dominate for the exploitation of resources,”[vi] which is probably why we and/or the media are not particularly concerned with these places).

What strikes me when thinking about censorship in China is its heavy handedness. It seems to me that if you limit what people can read, say, or do, you create a black market for these things, you fetishize them. People will search these things out and eventually form a counterculture or resistance around what is banned. Whereas, if you hide them in plain sight, so to speak, then people are just as easily going to be unconcerned or unbothered by them. This is shown by our government’s making public record such things as Project for the New American Century, School of the Americas/Western Hemishphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or simply by the decriminilization of lighter drugs in Holland and parts of Canada. It is no longer as compelling for most people if it is out in the open, it becomes transparent so that it is no longer noticed. It is no accident that the current administration, while having the reputation for being one of the most secretive administrations this country has ever seen, has had leaks about such things as NSA wiretaps, the collecting of virtually everyone’s phone records, secret prisons around the world, falsification of intelligence that led us to war, and so and so forth. These things were not simply leaked, but the battlefield (being public opinion), was softened first, then we were made aware of these things. And, while the president’s poll numbers are significantly down, he and the rest of the people in power have yet to be held accountable for any number of illegal acts.

Joseph Goebbels, mastermind behind the Nazi propaganda machine, understood how to keep the masses in a perpetual state of agitated content: “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”[vii] Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What sounds even more familiar is this: “The broadcasting programmes need to be put together in such a way that while they still cater for sophisticated tastes, they are also pleasing and accessible to less demanding listeners [or viewers, I suppose]…They should offer an intelligent and skillful blend of what is informative, stimulating, relaxing, and entertaining. Of these, relaxation deserves special care…giving them a right to recuperate and refresh themselves during the few hours when they are off work.”[viii] Distract us with an enemy, placate (anesthetize) us at home with entertainment, and conceal in plain sight exactly what you are doing.

So, my question is, if there was something occurring right now that was analagous to the Holocaust, would we notice? Would we even care? When I go to work tonight at the bar, people are going to be more than willing to talk about the beautiful weather we are having, LeBron James hitting a game winning shot, The Da Vinci Code’s luke warm reception at Cannes, but are we, as they sip their $8 cocktails and as I mix them, really wanting, even if we are capable, to discuss the potential that we are all Germans living under the shadow of that wall?

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[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions

[iii] The Culture of Make Believe, pg. 601, Derrick Jensen

[iv] ibid. Pg. 592

[v] ibid. Pg. 593-594

[vi] ibid. Pg. 577

[vii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie

[viii] The Culture of Make Believe, pg. 594, Derrick Jensen