Honestly, reviewing a decade is about as arbitrary as celebrating the end of a month or voting. Proper holidays and eras are marked by actual important events, interesting folk tales, or at least battles with orcs. All this decade nonsense is merely a byproduct of our number system. There's no cosmic significance, it's just the swapping of a digit.
That said, people put a lot of stock into it. In the U.S. at least, each decade is associated with a particular movement or aesthetic, even if it is a little forced. The sixties are remembered for the hippies, peace and love and LSD. What people forget is that it all took place in the last couple of years of that decade. But to be fair, if you remembered the movement during the seventies -- a decade marked by disco of all things -- it would be the tale of a massive cultural hangover, of failure, selling out and buying in.
But what the hell, right? Here we are, at the end of a decade that my own generation had a strong hand in shaping. If the twenties are represented by flappers and gangsters, the fightin' greatest generation belongs to the forties, and the eighties are slick wall street types, then there is little doubt that these aughts of ours will be remembered for the hipsters. And that's pretty depressing.
Here's the story, just in case the rock you were trapped under was larger than mine. Evidently, all those American Psycho assholes from cheerier economic times cut back on the cocaine long enough to raise some kids and put money away for them. This is called a trust fund, and it had to be explained to me because I am a poor boy from Appalachia and I do not understand such things. Naturally, these horrible little brats grew up into insufferable pricks with disposable funds and bad attitudes. They all moved to Brooklyn so they could hate each other more efficiently and for some reason this became the new hotness. Thanks to them, the rest of us will seem like total dipshits when future generations research the aughts via their Wikipedia brain implants. The end.
Of course that's not entirely accurate, and certainly doesn't do justice to the actual artists, musicians, and whathaveyous who laid the groundwork for the subculture in the first place. I'm simply taking the long view. I assume the scene looks different from a Williamsburg art gallery than it does from where I'm standing, but I'm standing here, and you can't have it both ways. The fact of the matter is that whether or not there are legit roots, the legacy will be idiotic fashion, bad beer, worse drugs, and ennui.
I must note that I honestly don't think the hipsters themselves are to blame for most of this. The pace of our society is such that the phases most subcultures go through happened to this one more or less at the same time. The whole thing was packaged for mass consumption before it even got the chance to define itself, burn out, and become the object of scorn in an organic fashion. Hipsterdom was exported simultaneously as a glamourous lifestyle and a stinging insult to its practitioners. The label itself is caustic, yet it can be applied to just about anyone in their twenties during the aughts if you look hard enough. Clothing, taste in music, choice of hangout, anything can identify you as a member, but there is no unifying philosophy, no community, no camaraderie to gain, only derision. It's almost as if the hipster subculture was created in a lab, the result of some nefarious scheme to devise the best possible social scene to stifle and slander an entire generation of young people.
It is somewhat unfair to come down too hard on a group characterized by a compulsive yearning for the authentic, even if the result was being unable to appreciate anything at all. Just look at what the the larger culture offered up this decade. It was a parade of mediocrity -- a decade of revamps, throwbacks, and revivals. Somebody somewhere crunched the numbers and decided that it just didn't add up to invest in new ideas when re-packaging old stuff guaranteed returns. Music artists made careers out of organizing the work of their forbears. Hollywood saw fit to defile just about every great comic book ever written and raked in an obscene amount doing it. Practically every decade this century has its music featured in themed dance parties at least once each week.
There was good stuff in there. This is a culture of such impressive excess that even niche art can sometimes get a chance. It was difficult to take heart from these small victories, though. Just ask a fan of Arrested Development or Firefly. Fresh, challenging stuff had to fight to survive in a market flooded with dime-a-dozen reality television shows and an endless stream of half-hearted movie remakes and sequels.
It's ironic. Our artistic culture these last ten years became a watered-down facade while at the same time the usually shadowy power apparatus came clean in unprecedented ways.
Make no mistake, our government has never been shy about using violence to forward the agendas of the economic institutions pulling the strings. After Vietnam though, they usually tried to hide that sort of thing -- private contractor assassins, special forces, propaganda, you name it. Failing that, they at least had to sell it really well. After September 11 -- that would be the one in 2001 in case you forgot -- they didn't really need to bother. All they have to do now is point at a country, mumble something about freedom and the founding fathers, maybe shed a single mournful tear and BOO-YA -- instant righteous war with a group of people who don't stand a chance.
The charade is now so paper-thin only the willingly ignorant can pretend it's there at all. Take Iraq, the war they tried to excuse on the basis of protecting folks from weapons of mass destruction and later as a humanitarian mission to free the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime. It all makes sense, provided you ignore the fact that North Korea had a far more viable nuclear program with a far crazier leader's finger on the button, and the fact that there are regimes in less oil-rich parts of the world that make Saddam Hussein look like George Fucking Washington. The military-industrial complex must perpetuate itself, and everyone needs to get on board or shut the hell up. Flower that up and amend the constitution, because that's how it works now.
Here in the U.S., the decade was presided over by George W. Bush, a man who has made great strides for the incredibly ignorant and unreasonably ambitious demographic. While I'm fairly certain he had very little to do with actual policy, his administration gave us endless wars, curtailed our rights, invaded our privacy, bombed the shit out of all kinds of people who didn't deserve it and cemented the swaggering, slack-jawed cowboy image the rest of the world has always had of anyone born on this part of the land mass. Naturally, after eight years, there was a bit of a backlash from all that. In 2008, the American people took the unprecedented step of electing someone who vowed to make war with furrowed brow as opposed to the throbbing erection of his predecessor. If there really were personifications for the decades, even the hippies would give us a swirly and take our lunch money.
If you too were disappointed that the armed conflict issue was settled by a vote between "war" and "more war," then I hope you weren't expecting great strides in the area of economic justice, because it wasn't even on the table. And by "not on the table," I mean of course such issues were swept from the metaphoric table, in the heat of passion, in order to create a space upon which the wealthy and powerful could make sweet sweet love to one another.
Imagine for a second that you get the chance to explain the recent financial meltdown to someone in the nineties through time travel or something. "You have to watch out for the investment banks and financial services industry on Wall Street," you'll say. "I know everyone's doing well now, but they've found a way to more or less artificially inflate their profits due to lack of oversight and regulatory loopholes. The problem is that the whole system is built upon the gamble that the housing market is never going to decline. But it will! When it does, all these old and reliable financial institutions will start falling like flies."
"Wow," your apprehensive listener will say, "that sounds serious. But how is that such a big deal? This is capitalism. Aren't they supposed to fail if they make a bad gamble?"
"That's the worst part," you'll elaborate while accentuating the story with bombastic gestures. "In the dead of night, government officials who used to work for Wall Street firms meet with the owners and executives and arrange to give them billions of dollars to keep them afloat with almost no strings attached. Over the next year or so, the economy will go into a tailspin, and this bailout system will expand."
"Uh... okay," your listener will edge away, but you'll grab them by the shoulders and lean in, eyes all crazy.
"The people responsible for the crisis get off without even a slap on the wrist. In fact, they all get huge bonuses. The stock market rebounds, but unemployment stays at record highs. Even though the whole idea of bailing them out was to avoid financial collapse, we give money to the people and institutions who caused it and let them do as they please with it. It's a disaster!"
"Oh," they'll say. "Wait here while I call the president," But they'll lie to you and call security instead, and you'll spend the rest of your life in a padded room mumbling about collateralized debt obligations and swatting at the ephemeral pixie bankers that harass you day and night.
No sane society would have allowed this to happen in the first place, but when things came to head in late 2008, the powers that supposedly represent us not only failed to dismantle this impenetrable and destructive system, but more or less gave the perpetrators license to continue indefinitely, comfortable with the knowledge that the government will bail them out if anything else goes wrong. As I write this, there is no substantive financial regulation being put in place or even really discussed, and an attempt to reform health care has morphed into a huge giveaway to the insurance companies who are responsible for that problem in the first place.
And every night you can turn on the television to watch tongue-in-cheek populist pundits scream and cry about any perceived -- and they are all perceived -- instance of resistance to our glorious "capitalist" system. The word itself has been reduced to meaninglessness. It has become a system completely unconcerned with long-term sustainability or any consideration for the society that supports it. It wears the trappings, but the merit-based system to which people refer died long ago and what rose in its place was something new. It no longer pretends to be more than a naked racket and so I feel it requires a new name, just for the sake of intellectual honesty.
When your children come of age, and you take them by the hand to go down to the local Wal-Mart to be implanted with the mandated computer chips to track corporate loyalty, brand preference, and hereditary debt to the banking overlords, you can tell them about the aughts and how a very clever person on the internet started calling it crapitalism.
While it wasn't invented during this decade, it's fair to say that the last ten years were when we figured out how we would make use of the internet. It is the technological tool with the greatest potential for the empowerment of small groups and individuals, and the societal element that will likely define our civilization until its collapse. Of course, we use it primarily to more efficiently scam one another, but this should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to the nature of the modern homo sapien.
To be fair, this is likely going to be the next decade's battle. Those who want to free information, grow communities, and subvert the old order are not likely to strike a deal with the forces who want to use the internet to cram advertisements in your face before they stomp on it -- at least not any time soon. The aughts were the years we used to experiment with it. We now have an understanding of its potential -- for creation and destruction, freedom and control -- and we can start to imagine just what we can do with it, and what we ought to avoid.
Previous generations imagined flying cars and laser guns by now. Fortunately for science fiction writers, technology seldom plays out exactly as expected. When this decade began, I never imagined I'd bother to own a cellular phone. It seemed to be quite an expense for such a small convenience. However, as I write this, I have in my pocket a device that can communicate with satellites to determine my exact location. Maybe it's not as exciting to everyone as it is to me, but we are living the science fiction of ten years ago.
So far we are not doing very well with it, I have to say. While this decade has seen the exploration of Mars, the mapping of the human genome, and the construction of a device intended to smash reality into its constituent parts, we have also been forced to witness the nastier side of advancement. We've seen the rejection of reason in favor of a soothing fairy tale to explain where we come from. We've seen people cry over the definition of the word "planet." We've had to watch our media and elected officials quibble over the extent of climate change while completely failing to address the thousands of other examples of how humanity is destroying the Earth.
Putting aside the question of whether or not a technological solution to our problems is possible or even desirable, it is a goal I can at least understand. We aren't even trying for some kind of Star Trek future anymore. When space-faring alien life forms visit our bleak world centuries from now they will conclude that we were a petty, violent people who had the means to avoid destruction but were too busy applying all our effort into the accumulation of personal wealth. I'd always hoped we were capable of more than that.
It's frustrating because we have the awareness to see just how oppressive and wasteful and foul our society has become, but we ignore it. We have the tools to tear down and replace the obsolete power structures that tell us how to live, but we forsake them. I still think we are a species with the ingenuity and gumption to learn from our mistakes and come up with something new and better, but we just aren't trying.
Apparently there isn't even a consensus on what to call this decade. I think "the aughts" is the perfect name for ten years we utterly squandered. Ten years in which the curtains were pulled back and we caught a glimpse of exactly how things work, but we decided to keep chatting with the giant flaming head.
In ten years, we'll declare another arbitrary milestone. While the most recent one left much to be desired, and that can be somewhat depressing, we always have the next one. Maybe the tens will be the decade we get worked up and do something. I wonder what that review will be like.
Personally, I want to write it in bullet holes. I want to write it in fire on the White House lawn. I'll write it in morse code, clinking my shackles together in the hope that someone can hear it. I want to write it with brainwaves that ride superelectrons straight into your cerebrum. I want to scratch it into the wall of a ruined building with what's left of my fingernails. I want to write the story of how we got it right or the story of how we went down in flames. I don't care as long as it's not the story of how we sat on our hands for ten more years.
If I don't write it, then I hope I die well -- or it's because I'm too busy having sex on the fucking moon.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Nuclear Weapons
I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, listen up. Whoever "they" are, they do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our fast food, our rock and roll music, or our apple pie. They hate us because of our insipid yet casual hegemonic behavior with regard to everyone else.
This week, The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea conducted an underground test of a nuclear weapon which may have yielded up to 20 kilotons -- the rough equivalent of the nuclear bombs dropped at the end of World War II.
Naturally, this action has been almost unanimously condemned by the international community with practically identical rhetoric. It's the same old jeopardizing-peace-and-stability routine. I won't bore you with the details, because I'm sure you've heard it all before.
In fact, we've been going through this for years now with North Korea and others and I'd just like to stop for a moment and ask why. Why bother? I don't actually think North Korea is going to try to nuke the White House or even deploy their weapons against their neighbors. They don't want to use them, they just want to sit at the big kid's table.
Would that be so bad? The way I see it, North Korea could use the geopolitical equivalent of a hug right now. It was the Cold War, people. They bet on the wrong horse and now they're scared and alone in a world full of enemies. Of course they want nuclear weapons, because the way they see it, that's their only path to legitimacy.
Well, now they have them. We could continue to pretend we can force them to unlearn their creation, or we can face reality and focus on how to keep them in their silos. What's the best way to keep them in their silos? Stop antagonizing North Korea.
Am I saying we should sanction the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Fuck no. I'm just trying to point out that our skewed perception of the issue is going to preclude reaching any kind of resolution everyone can live with, and our sanctimonious attitude is only going to foster more resentment.
We use terms like "rogue state," and assign them to the Axis of Evil. We treat them like comic book villains because that's a lot easier than trying to understand where they're coming from, or -- even worse -- acknowledging our own role in the situation.
After all, they're only playing the game we created.
When we invented the atom bomb, we could not drop those motherfuckers fast enough. Now here we are, the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on another and we're on top of the world -- we were at least. We tell ourselves it's because we're somehow better, that we're capable and responsible enough to have them. What they see in places like North Korea and Iran is rather different.
Whoever has the bombs makes the rules.
They see a juvenile club, complete with decoder rings and "No Girls Allowed" sign. They watch us invade sovereign states without provocation while insisting they are the dangerous ones. They see us sign nonproliferation treaties and then turn a blind eye when our friends want to break the rules.
This is the primary reason we will never be free of terrorist cells, violent religious zealots, and dick-waving contests with other countries.
Just to be clear, I think governance on the country/state level in general is madness, I don't care if its a benevolent democracy or an iron-fisted authoritarian situation. Far be it for me to try and tell you how all how to talk between your crazy selves. Where I come from, however, if you patronize and belittle everyone around you, you're not allowed to act surprised when they resent you for it.
This week, The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea conducted an underground test of a nuclear weapon which may have yielded up to 20 kilotons -- the rough equivalent of the nuclear bombs dropped at the end of World War II.
Naturally, this action has been almost unanimously condemned by the international community with practically identical rhetoric. It's the same old jeopardizing-peace-and-stability routine. I won't bore you with the details, because I'm sure you've heard it all before.
In fact, we've been going through this for years now with North Korea and others and I'd just like to stop for a moment and ask why. Why bother? I don't actually think North Korea is going to try to nuke the White House or even deploy their weapons against their neighbors. They don't want to use them, they just want to sit at the big kid's table.
Would that be so bad? The way I see it, North Korea could use the geopolitical equivalent of a hug right now. It was the Cold War, people. They bet on the wrong horse and now they're scared and alone in a world full of enemies. Of course they want nuclear weapons, because the way they see it, that's their only path to legitimacy.
Well, now they have them. We could continue to pretend we can force them to unlearn their creation, or we can face reality and focus on how to keep them in their silos. What's the best way to keep them in their silos? Stop antagonizing North Korea.
Am I saying we should sanction the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Fuck no. I'm just trying to point out that our skewed perception of the issue is going to preclude reaching any kind of resolution everyone can live with, and our sanctimonious attitude is only going to foster more resentment.
We use terms like "rogue state," and assign them to the Axis of Evil. We treat them like comic book villains because that's a lot easier than trying to understand where they're coming from, or -- even worse -- acknowledging our own role in the situation.
After all, they're only playing the game we created.
When we invented the atom bomb, we could not drop those motherfuckers fast enough. Now here we are, the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on another and we're on top of the world -- we were at least. We tell ourselves it's because we're somehow better, that we're capable and responsible enough to have them. What they see in places like North Korea and Iran is rather different.
Whoever has the bombs makes the rules.
They see a juvenile club, complete with decoder rings and "No Girls Allowed" sign. They watch us invade sovereign states without provocation while insisting they are the dangerous ones. They see us sign nonproliferation treaties and then turn a blind eye when our friends want to break the rules.
This is the primary reason we will never be free of terrorist cells, violent religious zealots, and dick-waving contests with other countries.
Just to be clear, I think governance on the country/state level in general is madness, I don't care if its a benevolent democracy or an iron-fisted authoritarian situation. Far be it for me to try and tell you how all how to talk between your crazy selves. Where I come from, however, if you patronize and belittle everyone around you, you're not allowed to act surprised when they resent you for it.
State Sovereignty
Imagine my surprise. I'm watching clips from Fox News posted to the media watchdog websites I typically peruse with my morning coffee and I see the likes of Glen Beck and Sean Hannity calling for dissent, secession and revolution. Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for conservatives of all kinds to take up the banner of anti-establishment once they were ousted from positions of power.
And I have to give them credit. If nothing else, the right wing of the American political spectrum is a worthy adversary. During the Bush administration, the Democratic party basically rolled over and did as it was told, but now, riding high and full of energy from President Obama's landslide victory, they still can't manage to get anything done.
The Republicans under Bush and Cheney took full advantage of the nation's fear and anger to realize a seriously heinous agenda and when anyone complained, they more or less just told them to shut up. But they went too far. They screwed the pooch and now many of their pasty, bloated Republican faces no longer spew their xenophobic nonsense in the halls of power. They are not, however, taking it laying down, and this revolution is being televised.
Just like their favorite political party, the Fox News folks have made the astonishing transition from nationalist patriots to anti-authority rabble rousers. The whole charade has some traction with the more extreme elements of the party, but it's off to a rocky start. They repeat -- without irony -- the same rhetoric of the left-minded protesters they mocked for the last eight years. Not to mention they accidentally associated their first big protest event with the taste of scrotum.
I'd like to take a moment to ask you to visualize this role-reversal. Imagine Rush Limbaugh in anarchist riot black with a face full of pepper spray, Sean Hannity wrestled to the ground pleading, "don't taze me, bro!" to no avail. I want you to picture Glen Beck doing his fake weeping routine not for an audience, but for a judge about to send him away for conspiracy.
It's hard to do, right? That's because these guys are full of shit.
This is hardly breaking news, I know. The right is hilariously bad at this whole opposition thing and it shows. There is, however, one realistic and interesting point floating around in the whole mess; state sovereignty. It's a real shame this idea is starting to gain momentum now and with this gang of jackasses because it will likely be dismissed as the blatant power play that it is.
So before it is flushed down the toilet next week when Fox's precious hysteria reserves are committed to some other scandal, I'd like to take a moment to examine it from a perspective other than that of the paranoid conservative flash-in-the-pan populist.
You know, the paranoid anarchist perspective.
Fortunately, since I am not an elected representative nor am I a major media figure, I don't have to go through the rote platitudes required whenever one wants to criticize an aspect of our governance. You know, the "This is a great nation. I love my country, but..." nonsense. I care about our government as much as my last bowel movement, but here's how we might actually make it work.
As an anarchist, I believe that the most effective and least oppressive form of society is small -- the size of a band or tribe. Although customs and rules will vary from group to group, they ought to be voluntary gatherings of individuals. I think that organization on this level is far fairer to people than the bloated, faceless entities which currently control our lives, whose only real purpose is to gain more power which they use to justify their continued existence.
As a realist, I understand that this notion of being part of a large group, having support at high echelons, and generally not being forced to worry about some things is comforting to most people. I also realize that our culture has done a thorough job of convincing most people that if we consider decentralizing our government today, the bombs will fall tomorrow and there will be radioactive zombies by next Monday.
What I'm proposing is something far more gradual. Although I'd rather see a more drastic shift, why don't we start allowing the states more authority? That's right. I propose we try something out that lets you keep your big government that protects you from the communist space aliens.
You will immediately see a lifting of a great deal of the apathy that so characterizes our political system, It's easy to feel small and insignificant when all the real action is taking place in an arena as large as the entire country, but on the state level, one person can influence the system in far more profound ways.
It might even make a dent in the rampant corruption and nepotism we tolerate in our power structure for some reason. If the most powerful positions are many and have smaller constituencies, lobbyists and special interests of all kinds will have more trouble keeping them all in line. Aided by a more personal relationship to their voters, independent and third party candidates will have an easier time surmounting the challenges presented by the funding and support networks fielded by the major political parties. Even if the system is abused, it will be far easier to throw a wrench into it when there are so many parts.
It would give us all the chance to put our ideas to the test without subjecting everyone else to them. Life as a social experiment. Isn't that at all tempting? People and prosperity will find their way to those places with good, working ideas. We will be able to see what works and what doesn't, re-work it, try again. if something is a total failure, well we've still got a support system there because we didn't dismantle the federal government entirely. Not yet anyway.
Keep in mind that this is not what is being suggested by the windbags I mentioned before. They're posturing, bluffing, using wedge issues and tough talk to try to regain some of their lost influence. They are not interested in any kind of social experiment because their white asses are kept plump by the system as it is. They just want their guy back on the throne.
I'll be honest, I think this proposal will ultimately lead people to question this new apparatus of authority, to perhaps break it down even further, but even if I'm wrong, it will still have a positive impact on what I think is the biggest problem we face right now, the diffused responsibility for our actions.
The burdens of intolerance, of a lack of consideration for our environment, of overpopulation, of concentrated wealth, of dubious sustainability... It's hard not to look at these as abstract problems. They're too huge. "Someone should save the condor," "someone should save the Everglades", "someone should do something about degrading topsoil." If we can empower people in the way that I am proposing, we can change the way we approach these problems.
You can protect and cherish the natural wonders in your own back yard. You can do something about sustainability and inequity in your own community. That seems considerably more effective than electing someone else to congress, doesn't it?
And I have to give them credit. If nothing else, the right wing of the American political spectrum is a worthy adversary. During the Bush administration, the Democratic party basically rolled over and did as it was told, but now, riding high and full of energy from President Obama's landslide victory, they still can't manage to get anything done.
The Republicans under Bush and Cheney took full advantage of the nation's fear and anger to realize a seriously heinous agenda and when anyone complained, they more or less just told them to shut up. But they went too far. They screwed the pooch and now many of their pasty, bloated Republican faces no longer spew their xenophobic nonsense in the halls of power. They are not, however, taking it laying down, and this revolution is being televised.
Just like their favorite political party, the Fox News folks have made the astonishing transition from nationalist patriots to anti-authority rabble rousers. The whole charade has some traction with the more extreme elements of the party, but it's off to a rocky start. They repeat -- without irony -- the same rhetoric of the left-minded protesters they mocked for the last eight years. Not to mention they accidentally associated their first big protest event with the taste of scrotum.
I'd like to take a moment to ask you to visualize this role-reversal. Imagine Rush Limbaugh in anarchist riot black with a face full of pepper spray, Sean Hannity wrestled to the ground pleading, "don't taze me, bro!" to no avail. I want you to picture Glen Beck doing his fake weeping routine not for an audience, but for a judge about to send him away for conspiracy.
It's hard to do, right? That's because these guys are full of shit.
This is hardly breaking news, I know. The right is hilariously bad at this whole opposition thing and it shows. There is, however, one realistic and interesting point floating around in the whole mess; state sovereignty. It's a real shame this idea is starting to gain momentum now and with this gang of jackasses because it will likely be dismissed as the blatant power play that it is.
So before it is flushed down the toilet next week when Fox's precious hysteria reserves are committed to some other scandal, I'd like to take a moment to examine it from a perspective other than that of the paranoid conservative flash-in-the-pan populist.
You know, the paranoid anarchist perspective.
Fortunately, since I am not an elected representative nor am I a major media figure, I don't have to go through the rote platitudes required whenever one wants to criticize an aspect of our governance. You know, the "This is a great nation. I love my country, but..." nonsense. I care about our government as much as my last bowel movement, but here's how we might actually make it work.
As an anarchist, I believe that the most effective and least oppressive form of society is small -- the size of a band or tribe. Although customs and rules will vary from group to group, they ought to be voluntary gatherings of individuals. I think that organization on this level is far fairer to people than the bloated, faceless entities which currently control our lives, whose only real purpose is to gain more power which they use to justify their continued existence.
As a realist, I understand that this notion of being part of a large group, having support at high echelons, and generally not being forced to worry about some things is comforting to most people. I also realize that our culture has done a thorough job of convincing most people that if we consider decentralizing our government today, the bombs will fall tomorrow and there will be radioactive zombies by next Monday.
What I'm proposing is something far more gradual. Although I'd rather see a more drastic shift, why don't we start allowing the states more authority? That's right. I propose we try something out that lets you keep your big government that protects you from the communist space aliens.
You will immediately see a lifting of a great deal of the apathy that so characterizes our political system, It's easy to feel small and insignificant when all the real action is taking place in an arena as large as the entire country, but on the state level, one person can influence the system in far more profound ways.
It might even make a dent in the rampant corruption and nepotism we tolerate in our power structure for some reason. If the most powerful positions are many and have smaller constituencies, lobbyists and special interests of all kinds will have more trouble keeping them all in line. Aided by a more personal relationship to their voters, independent and third party candidates will have an easier time surmounting the challenges presented by the funding and support networks fielded by the major political parties. Even if the system is abused, it will be far easier to throw a wrench into it when there are so many parts.
It would give us all the chance to put our ideas to the test without subjecting everyone else to them. Life as a social experiment. Isn't that at all tempting? People and prosperity will find their way to those places with good, working ideas. We will be able to see what works and what doesn't, re-work it, try again. if something is a total failure, well we've still got a support system there because we didn't dismantle the federal government entirely. Not yet anyway.
Keep in mind that this is not what is being suggested by the windbags I mentioned before. They're posturing, bluffing, using wedge issues and tough talk to try to regain some of their lost influence. They are not interested in any kind of social experiment because their white asses are kept plump by the system as it is. They just want their guy back on the throne.
I'll be honest, I think this proposal will ultimately lead people to question this new apparatus of authority, to perhaps break it down even further, but even if I'm wrong, it will still have a positive impact on what I think is the biggest problem we face right now, the diffused responsibility for our actions.
The burdens of intolerance, of a lack of consideration for our environment, of overpopulation, of concentrated wealth, of dubious sustainability... It's hard not to look at these as abstract problems. They're too huge. "Someone should save the condor," "someone should save the Everglades", "someone should do something about degrading topsoil." If we can empower people in the way that I am proposing, we can change the way we approach these problems.
You can protect and cherish the natural wonders in your own back yard. You can do something about sustainability and inequity in your own community. That seems considerably more effective than electing someone else to congress, doesn't it?
The Financial Crisis
As you may have heard, last week Somali pirates attempted to capture a merchant vessel registered in the United States. Unable to maintain control of the container ship, they absconded in a lifeboat with the captain as a prisoner. In the end, the pirates were all killed or captured and the captain was freed.
Few in the US ever really thought about Somali piracy before this incident. As usual, the news services dedicated lots of time to tearful reunions, masturbatory whooping, and self-righteous fulminations on the scourge of piracy. Obviously, they failed to spend much time on the context. Piracy is a major source of income for communities in the depressed and forgotten coastal areas of northern Somalia. The public probably has an image of flamboyantly dressed, dashing ne'er-do-wells taking what they want while they bathe in rum and generally enjoy themselves. This is fantasy. The region is known for ethnic strife, poverty, and war, and the lack of a stable government means they have no representation on the global stage. The pirates not only bring goods and currency into the area, but act as a makeshift militia and sometime advocacy organization.
In the last several months, Wall Street investment banks and other financial institutions attempted to justify losing billions of dollars by betting on an inflated housing market and bad debt. Unable to maintain the confidence of investors, they went belly-up and were forced to seek assistance from the government. Deemed too big to fail, most of them received the capital they required to survive.
Few in the US ever really thought about these underhanded business practices before the sudden collapse of Bear Stearns. The media then boned up and informed us about hedge funds and subprime mortgages and credit default swaps while they entertained us with outraged politicians and really, really awkward congressional hearings. However, I feel that no one ever adequately explained why we needed to prop up these failing institutions. There is an entire class which lives by buying promises and selling dreams and they exist in a nether-world between our elected officials' complicity and their ignorance. As a whole, the public is trained to imagine Beyond Thunderdome whenever anyone suggests a little creative destruction. This is fantasy. The system does not function to maintain fairness, it exists to turn the toil, suffering, and hardship of the many into the yachts, cocaine, and Dom Pérignon of the few.
To begin the parade of tortured metaphors which I think are extremely clever and am forced to use because they put a linguistic spin on what is essentially a math problem and math make me head hurt, I'd like you to imagine an ancient city in the desert, lost to history. Within this ruin, it is said, lies the knowledge of the ancients. We know it's there, we just can't find it because it's buried under the sand.
One day a massive sandstorm sweeps through and in its wake, the ancient city of special truths is revealed. Well, that's what the crisis has done. We all knew -- or at least those of us who cared enough to think about it knew -- that our culture was rotten, our institutions corrupt, and our way of life unsustainable. It was easy not to think about it because... you know, Xbox.
This time, we're looking right at it. It's not happening to faceless foreigners or baby seals now. There is no logic, no foundation, no real and honest value to the society we've created and we can no longer deny or ignore this simple fact.
But we will.
The bulk of the outrage has already been deftly deflected by our political institutions. The Republicans blame the Democrats, The Democrats blame the Republicans, and Glenn Beck blames his last tie to reality, cuts it, and drifts off into the ether on a updraft of xenophobic bald eagle farts.
The anger that remains cannot be used constructively. It belongs to the paranoid extremists. Those who recognized something was wrong, but found it far easier to name it Black, Jew, or Mexican. They have their own part to play in this sad drama. They become the figureheads for all who would step out of line. Every tragedy they perpetrate associates dissent with atrocity and further insulates the system.
Don't murder unless you're got a good publicist.
I think our leaders have convinced most of the rest of us that we can return to the America of yore. The 1950s post war America. Picket fences, cars with outrageous fins, and unlimited growth. We believe that if we elect the right person or give our money to the right corporations, we can be that society again. We want to be guiltless like we were -- pastel colors, living in the suburbs, cigarette smoking guiltless.
That cannot happen. The tangible work of our global economy is now done elsewhere and the United States has become the world's country club. We're all either swimming in the pool or we're cleaning it. With the poor countries who make our junk modernizing and our own institutions crumbling, the "service economy" I remember my middle school social studies textbooks proudly touting is revealed as the circle jerk that it is.
I have an idea. Why don't we try to actually be the inventive, hard-working people we claim we are and come up with something better? And I'm not talking about putting our noses to the same old grindstone and making more widgets. The events of the economic crisis have made it pretty clear that when the shit goes down, the real perpetrators get parachutes while the rest of us will be lucky to receive a backpack filled with kitchen utensils and good comedic timing. We need to treat this as an opportunity to turn a critical eye to the inner workings of our economic system while they are laid bare. We should use this as a learning experience and take steps to make our way of life sustainable and sane.
Unfortunately, it's an opportunity we seem hell-bent on squandering. We'll probably just move the debt around, consolidate some corporations, and sweep the mess under the rug. Then the next time the market sneezes, we'll go through the whole thing all over again.
I'm not saying the Somali pirates are nice guys, because I'm sure they're not. They are, however, smart enough to know when the deck is stacked and inventive enough to change the game in response. The hedge funds and investment banks took advantage of their status and legal limbo the enrich themselves and now they're blackmailing us with economic collapse if we don't give them more. How about that? Our financial institutions are starting to look more like pirates than actual pirates.
They used to hang pirates, did they not?
Few in the US ever really thought about Somali piracy before this incident. As usual, the news services dedicated lots of time to tearful reunions, masturbatory whooping, and self-righteous fulminations on the scourge of piracy. Obviously, they failed to spend much time on the context. Piracy is a major source of income for communities in the depressed and forgotten coastal areas of northern Somalia. The public probably has an image of flamboyantly dressed, dashing ne'er-do-wells taking what they want while they bathe in rum and generally enjoy themselves. This is fantasy. The region is known for ethnic strife, poverty, and war, and the lack of a stable government means they have no representation on the global stage. The pirates not only bring goods and currency into the area, but act as a makeshift militia and sometime advocacy organization.
In the last several months, Wall Street investment banks and other financial institutions attempted to justify losing billions of dollars by betting on an inflated housing market and bad debt. Unable to maintain the confidence of investors, they went belly-up and were forced to seek assistance from the government. Deemed too big to fail, most of them received the capital they required to survive.
Few in the US ever really thought about these underhanded business practices before the sudden collapse of Bear Stearns. The media then boned up and informed us about hedge funds and subprime mortgages and credit default swaps while they entertained us with outraged politicians and really, really awkward congressional hearings. However, I feel that no one ever adequately explained why we needed to prop up these failing institutions. There is an entire class which lives by buying promises and selling dreams and they exist in a nether-world between our elected officials' complicity and their ignorance. As a whole, the public is trained to imagine Beyond Thunderdome whenever anyone suggests a little creative destruction. This is fantasy. The system does not function to maintain fairness, it exists to turn the toil, suffering, and hardship of the many into the yachts, cocaine, and Dom Pérignon of the few.
To begin the parade of tortured metaphors which I think are extremely clever and am forced to use because they put a linguistic spin on what is essentially a math problem and math make me head hurt, I'd like you to imagine an ancient city in the desert, lost to history. Within this ruin, it is said, lies the knowledge of the ancients. We know it's there, we just can't find it because it's buried under the sand.
One day a massive sandstorm sweeps through and in its wake, the ancient city of special truths is revealed. Well, that's what the crisis has done. We all knew -- or at least those of us who cared enough to think about it knew -- that our culture was rotten, our institutions corrupt, and our way of life unsustainable. It was easy not to think about it because... you know, Xbox.
This time, we're looking right at it. It's not happening to faceless foreigners or baby seals now. There is no logic, no foundation, no real and honest value to the society we've created and we can no longer deny or ignore this simple fact.
But we will.
The bulk of the outrage has already been deftly deflected by our political institutions. The Republicans blame the Democrats, The Democrats blame the Republicans, and Glenn Beck blames his last tie to reality, cuts it, and drifts off into the ether on a updraft of xenophobic bald eagle farts.
The anger that remains cannot be used constructively. It belongs to the paranoid extremists. Those who recognized something was wrong, but found it far easier to name it Black, Jew, or Mexican. They have their own part to play in this sad drama. They become the figureheads for all who would step out of line. Every tragedy they perpetrate associates dissent with atrocity and further insulates the system.
Don't murder unless you're got a good publicist.
I think our leaders have convinced most of the rest of us that we can return to the America of yore. The 1950s post war America. Picket fences, cars with outrageous fins, and unlimited growth. We believe that if we elect the right person or give our money to the right corporations, we can be that society again. We want to be guiltless like we were -- pastel colors, living in the suburbs, cigarette smoking guiltless.
That cannot happen. The tangible work of our global economy is now done elsewhere and the United States has become the world's country club. We're all either swimming in the pool or we're cleaning it. With the poor countries who make our junk modernizing and our own institutions crumbling, the "service economy" I remember my middle school social studies textbooks proudly touting is revealed as the circle jerk that it is.
I have an idea. Why don't we try to actually be the inventive, hard-working people we claim we are and come up with something better? And I'm not talking about putting our noses to the same old grindstone and making more widgets. The events of the economic crisis have made it pretty clear that when the shit goes down, the real perpetrators get parachutes while the rest of us will be lucky to receive a backpack filled with kitchen utensils and good comedic timing. We need to treat this as an opportunity to turn a critical eye to the inner workings of our economic system while they are laid bare. We should use this as a learning experience and take steps to make our way of life sustainable and sane.
Unfortunately, it's an opportunity we seem hell-bent on squandering. We'll probably just move the debt around, consolidate some corporations, and sweep the mess under the rug. Then the next time the market sneezes, we'll go through the whole thing all over again.
I'm not saying the Somali pirates are nice guys, because I'm sure they're not. They are, however, smart enough to know when the deck is stacked and inventive enough to change the game in response. The hedge funds and investment banks took advantage of their status and legal limbo the enrich themselves and now they're blackmailing us with economic collapse if we don't give them more. How about that? Our financial institutions are starting to look more like pirates than actual pirates.
They used to hang pirates, did they not?
The Obama Presidency, Month One
I was in elementary school when Bill Clinton was first elected. I remember putting crayon to cardboard and producing a "Go Clinton!" campaign sign to hang in the hallway outside my classroom on election day. I remember my conservative, Republican parents were astonished when they saw it. The thing is, I had chosen Mr. Clinton at random. I don't remember being pushed one way or the other by my teachers or peers, but I don't remember receiving any information upon which to base my decision. It was just, "pick one, color something, I'm going out for a smoke."
I learned an important lesson that day, though. It doesn't really matter who the president is, but people take that shit seriously anyway.
Now, one month into the most anticipated presidency of my lifetime, both the country and the office are quite different than they were back when I doodled that sign. We were riding high back then. We were fresh off a brief, successful war (successful as long as you weren't a rebellious Iraqi, that is), the economy was on the verge of exploding (a lot of people who didn't deserve it at all were about to get very rich), and as it turns out, we had so little to worry about that it was of the utmost importance to determine what the president did and did not do with his penis.
Barack Obama was elected in the midst of two (or three, or a thousand, depends on how you look at it) endless wars, a financial meltdown nobody really understands (I like to say the invisible hand got a little fresh with the wrong dame), and is inheriting the office from an administration which covertly abused the powers they could not publicly expand and everyone just went along with it.
I think it's safe to say our new president has to live up to some pretty serious expectations.
One of his first actions was to begin the process of fulfilling his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Brilliantly savvy. He gets to have his cake and eat it a la mode here. It's not like fixing social security, reforming campaign fund raising, or increasing transparency in government. It's a simple matter, comparatively. He pleases the peace-loving folks who put him into office in the first place, but he really only pisses off the fringe psychopaths who openly condone electrocuting the genitals of anyone without a Dale Earnhardt mesh cap. It's a positive politically, but it also may help to clean up America's reputation with the rest of the world.
The other advantage to such a move is that it will help to obscure the fact that President Obama is not likely to instigate or assist a serious investigation on the actions of the previous administration, much less put them on trial and lock their asses up like he should. I want to note that do not say this out of a sense of revenge. Sure, they should be punished for abuse of power, lying in order to build a case for war, politicizing the justice department, you get the idea. It's a long list and I am no legal scholar. The problem is that these actions have to be punished or we will see them happen again.
I know many of you have the utmost faith in the new president, and to be honest, I think he may be as honorable a politician as I have ever seen. He will, however, only be the president for eight years, maximum. What happens if he makes a bad penis-related decision and it's all over the news and he fails to win in four years? What if he's replaced by a shape-shifting alien? What if he's an evil android bent on enslaving all biological life?
"I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," is what he said during a press conference earlier this month. I fear he may attempt to avoid this admittedly messy affair, even though it is crucial that someone holds his predecessor accountable. To be fair, congress would be doing much of the work here, but the whole ordeal would be carried out on the president's watch. Rush Limbaugh will get to blame the witch hunt on him (he'll probably make a few Joe McCarthy references completely without irony). The president will lose momentum. Too bad. He needs to do his job.
I think that, as a nation, we have this image of the president as the captain of a ship, there are obviously other people--senators, judges, ultimately the voters who elect these people--who make the ship work, but the president sets the course and brings everything together. This is not the president's true role in this analogy.
The president is the sponge used to swab the deck.
Avoiding for simplicity's sake the questions of when and how this came to be, it seems pretty clear that there are deep, systemic problems with our country, our culture, with the way of life of the vast majority of humanity, really. It has been this way for some time.
The problem is that most of us do not benefit from this system, and those few of us who do only do so in order that we may be of better service to those scant few on top who live so lavishly that they are practically no longer human at this point. The system is set up to keep them where they are and mollify the rest of us. It doesn't always work that way, though. The business of sailing this ship is a messy one. People get hurt, they lose everything, communities are bankrupted, industries fail and markets collapse sometimes when someone gets too greedy or too sloppy and we can see it plainly. We can see what the system really is and what it generates.
And then the president steps in. The president must, in some way or another, own these messes. He must absorb them because he works for the system. He is in power for only a short time and he takes responsibility for these problems because someone has to carry the blame. Otherwise we might blame the system itself.
President Obama is going to have to be pretty absorbent to do this job. We're in a bigger mess now than we have been in quite some time. The entire banking/credit institution upon which the grand inequity of our time is based is failing. The system demands that it be saved, and Barack Obama is going to have to sell that to us.
He'll do it, too. It will take unprecedented quantities of stopgaps, theatrics, and make-work, but he's charismatic enough to pull it off. What his predecessor could not contain with anger, fear, and xenophobia he will sop up with a fresh attitude, hope, and a can-do, pull-together spirit. He will not, however, betray the system.
I do actually think he's sincere. I do think he wants to help. It's this sincerity that will make him so good at his job. He's no more free of the zeitgeist than you or I, a president can't change anything. They belong to the system, the network of donors and owners who put them in office.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope he does identify the systemic problems we face and is willing to deconstruct things enough to get at them. At this rate, though, he's not going to have much time to do so before he has to begin his reelection campaign.
I learned an important lesson that day, though. It doesn't really matter who the president is, but people take that shit seriously anyway.
Now, one month into the most anticipated presidency of my lifetime, both the country and the office are quite different than they were back when I doodled that sign. We were riding high back then. We were fresh off a brief, successful war (successful as long as you weren't a rebellious Iraqi, that is), the economy was on the verge of exploding (a lot of people who didn't deserve it at all were about to get very rich), and as it turns out, we had so little to worry about that it was of the utmost importance to determine what the president did and did not do with his penis.
Barack Obama was elected in the midst of two (or three, or a thousand, depends on how you look at it) endless wars, a financial meltdown nobody really understands (I like to say the invisible hand got a little fresh with the wrong dame), and is inheriting the office from an administration which covertly abused the powers they could not publicly expand and everyone just went along with it.
I think it's safe to say our new president has to live up to some pretty serious expectations.
One of his first actions was to begin the process of fulfilling his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Brilliantly savvy. He gets to have his cake and eat it a la mode here. It's not like fixing social security, reforming campaign fund raising, or increasing transparency in government. It's a simple matter, comparatively. He pleases the peace-loving folks who put him into office in the first place, but he really only pisses off the fringe psychopaths who openly condone electrocuting the genitals of anyone without a Dale Earnhardt mesh cap. It's a positive politically, but it also may help to clean up America's reputation with the rest of the world.
The other advantage to such a move is that it will help to obscure the fact that President Obama is not likely to instigate or assist a serious investigation on the actions of the previous administration, much less put them on trial and lock their asses up like he should. I want to note that do not say this out of a sense of revenge. Sure, they should be punished for abuse of power, lying in order to build a case for war, politicizing the justice department, you get the idea. It's a long list and I am no legal scholar. The problem is that these actions have to be punished or we will see them happen again.
I know many of you have the utmost faith in the new president, and to be honest, I think he may be as honorable a politician as I have ever seen. He will, however, only be the president for eight years, maximum. What happens if he makes a bad penis-related decision and it's all over the news and he fails to win in four years? What if he's replaced by a shape-shifting alien? What if he's an evil android bent on enslaving all biological life?
"I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," is what he said during a press conference earlier this month. I fear he may attempt to avoid this admittedly messy affair, even though it is crucial that someone holds his predecessor accountable. To be fair, congress would be doing much of the work here, but the whole ordeal would be carried out on the president's watch. Rush Limbaugh will get to blame the witch hunt on him (he'll probably make a few Joe McCarthy references completely without irony). The president will lose momentum. Too bad. He needs to do his job.
I think that, as a nation, we have this image of the president as the captain of a ship, there are obviously other people--senators, judges, ultimately the voters who elect these people--who make the ship work, but the president sets the course and brings everything together. This is not the president's true role in this analogy.
The president is the sponge used to swab the deck.
Avoiding for simplicity's sake the questions of when and how this came to be, it seems pretty clear that there are deep, systemic problems with our country, our culture, with the way of life of the vast majority of humanity, really. It has been this way for some time.
The problem is that most of us do not benefit from this system, and those few of us who do only do so in order that we may be of better service to those scant few on top who live so lavishly that they are practically no longer human at this point. The system is set up to keep them where they are and mollify the rest of us. It doesn't always work that way, though. The business of sailing this ship is a messy one. People get hurt, they lose everything, communities are bankrupted, industries fail and markets collapse sometimes when someone gets too greedy or too sloppy and we can see it plainly. We can see what the system really is and what it generates.
And then the president steps in. The president must, in some way or another, own these messes. He must absorb them because he works for the system. He is in power for only a short time and he takes responsibility for these problems because someone has to carry the blame. Otherwise we might blame the system itself.
President Obama is going to have to be pretty absorbent to do this job. We're in a bigger mess now than we have been in quite some time. The entire banking/credit institution upon which the grand inequity of our time is based is failing. The system demands that it be saved, and Barack Obama is going to have to sell that to us.
He'll do it, too. It will take unprecedented quantities of stopgaps, theatrics, and make-work, but he's charismatic enough to pull it off. What his predecessor could not contain with anger, fear, and xenophobia he will sop up with a fresh attitude, hope, and a can-do, pull-together spirit. He will not, however, betray the system.
I do actually think he's sincere. I do think he wants to help. It's this sincerity that will make him so good at his job. He's no more free of the zeitgeist than you or I, a president can't change anything. They belong to the system, the network of donors and owners who put them in office.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope he does identify the systemic problems we face and is willing to deconstruct things enough to get at them. At this rate, though, he's not going to have much time to do so before he has to begin his reelection campaign.
Frost/Nixon
There are so many reasons to dislike this film.
The documentary-loving responsible historian voice in my head is offended by its cavalier attitude toward the actual sequence of events. Granted, I didn't know this for a fact while I was watching it, but I felt confident in that assessment at the time and it tuns out I was correct. Not only that, but it invents entire exchanges which never happened for dramatic purposes. These things are rather important to me. I couldn't let myself see Kingdom of Heaven because that voice would probably land me in jail for assaulting the poor theater employee operating the projector and then lecturing the terrified movie-goers about the Crusades at gunpoint.
The voice that sounds like Patrick Steward wonders why we aren't watching Sci-fi or playing a video game. I respond that maybe this review blog project shouldn't be a total nerd-fest but then I realize I'm fooling no one.
The militant anti-establishment voice wonders why we should even care. I've got enough context to know that getting caught doing something wrong doesn't make a politician a demon any more than a bullet in the brain makes him a saint. Nothing against Nixon-bashing, it's fun for the whole family. He's still the poster boy for American despotism despite the fact that the United States' system of governance was abused worse under Lincoln. It's just old, isn't it? Why celebrate our one minor and rather belated victory over political corruption over and over ad nauseam when we are clearly losing that war?
There are times, however, when you have to take a stand. You have to say to the voices in your head, "Enough! I'm in charge here!" Just don't say it out loud in a public place because most people find spirited discourse with entities inside your own mind a little disquieting.
The point is, I enjoyed Frost/Nixon despite those problems. It's well-constructed and compellingly presented. It is adapted by Peter Morgan from a play he penned with the same name, and directed by Ron Howard. The source material's influence is evident throughout the film and is one of its major strengths. Frost/Nixon is about a contest of wits, after all, a verbal duel between the titular figures. The film manages to channel some of that raw actor versus actor energy you would expect to find on the stage, but uses cameras to get us even closer. Morgan and Howard manage to make it candid and human when I had pessimistically expected over-dramatization.
I have heard the complaint that Frank Langella looks nothing like Richard Nixon. While I suppose I agree with it, I fail to see why this is a deal-breaker for so many viewers. Do they expect Ron Howard to go to some evil magic university and major in necromancy so he can raise a zombie Dick Nixon from the grave to star in his retelling of the interview with David Frost, but then everything goes horribly wrong when zombie Nixon kills the film crew and turns them into undead slaves who then go out and make even more undead slaves all in the name of President Zombie Nixon?
I think I have a script to write.
Anyway, Langella's portrayal is heartfelt and genuine. He easily surmounts his jowl deficiency while playing the role accurately and honestly. His Nixon is not a monster. He puts a human face on the biggest bogeyman in American politics and he does it with admirable grace.
In the interview which is the subject of Frost/Nixon, the advisers, producers, and even its contemporary viewers were looking to get something out of it. In most cases, they wanted to give Nixon the trial he never received. They wanted him to answer for his transgressions. The film, however, has the advantage of being able to look back on the events it depicts, and the Nixon years in general, with some context. Conveniently, it does this just as another corrupt administration retires to mansions rather than prison cells.
Frost/Nixon is thus free to open up the conversation, to look at the events through a different lens. After all, it wasn't a politician who got the famous admission out of Tricky Dick. It wasn't a freedom fighter or a judge or an ideologue of any stripe. It was a British talk show host and a camera.
I like to see it as a grand statement about the nature of politics. It's all theater, really. The film shines a light on the inner workings of a television interview that meant so much more than an evening's distraction for those who witnessed it. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I do have voices to appease over here.
The documentary-loving responsible historian voice in my head is offended by its cavalier attitude toward the actual sequence of events. Granted, I didn't know this for a fact while I was watching it, but I felt confident in that assessment at the time and it tuns out I was correct. Not only that, but it invents entire exchanges which never happened for dramatic purposes. These things are rather important to me. I couldn't let myself see Kingdom of Heaven because that voice would probably land me in jail for assaulting the poor theater employee operating the projector and then lecturing the terrified movie-goers about the Crusades at gunpoint.
The voice that sounds like Patrick Steward wonders why we aren't watching Sci-fi or playing a video game. I respond that maybe this review blog project shouldn't be a total nerd-fest but then I realize I'm fooling no one.
The militant anti-establishment voice wonders why we should even care. I've got enough context to know that getting caught doing something wrong doesn't make a politician a demon any more than a bullet in the brain makes him a saint. Nothing against Nixon-bashing, it's fun for the whole family. He's still the poster boy for American despotism despite the fact that the United States' system of governance was abused worse under Lincoln. It's just old, isn't it? Why celebrate our one minor and rather belated victory over political corruption over and over ad nauseam when we are clearly losing that war?
There are times, however, when you have to take a stand. You have to say to the voices in your head, "Enough! I'm in charge here!" Just don't say it out loud in a public place because most people find spirited discourse with entities inside your own mind a little disquieting.
The point is, I enjoyed Frost/Nixon despite those problems. It's well-constructed and compellingly presented. It is adapted by Peter Morgan from a play he penned with the same name, and directed by Ron Howard. The source material's influence is evident throughout the film and is one of its major strengths. Frost/Nixon is about a contest of wits, after all, a verbal duel between the titular figures. The film manages to channel some of that raw actor versus actor energy you would expect to find on the stage, but uses cameras to get us even closer. Morgan and Howard manage to make it candid and human when I had pessimistically expected over-dramatization.
I have heard the complaint that Frank Langella looks nothing like Richard Nixon. While I suppose I agree with it, I fail to see why this is a deal-breaker for so many viewers. Do they expect Ron Howard to go to some evil magic university and major in necromancy so he can raise a zombie Dick Nixon from the grave to star in his retelling of the interview with David Frost, but then everything goes horribly wrong when zombie Nixon kills the film crew and turns them into undead slaves who then go out and make even more undead slaves all in the name of President Zombie Nixon?
I think I have a script to write.
Anyway, Langella's portrayal is heartfelt and genuine. He easily surmounts his jowl deficiency while playing the role accurately and honestly. His Nixon is not a monster. He puts a human face on the biggest bogeyman in American politics and he does it with admirable grace.
In the interview which is the subject of Frost/Nixon, the advisers, producers, and even its contemporary viewers were looking to get something out of it. In most cases, they wanted to give Nixon the trial he never received. They wanted him to answer for his transgressions. The film, however, has the advantage of being able to look back on the events it depicts, and the Nixon years in general, with some context. Conveniently, it does this just as another corrupt administration retires to mansions rather than prison cells.
Frost/Nixon is thus free to open up the conversation, to look at the events through a different lens. After all, it wasn't a politician who got the famous admission out of Tricky Dick. It wasn't a freedom fighter or a judge or an ideologue of any stripe. It was a British talk show host and a camera.
I like to see it as a grand statement about the nature of politics. It's all theater, really. The film shines a light on the inner workings of a television interview that meant so much more than an evening's distraction for those who witnessed it. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I do have voices to appease over here.
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