Film Review: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

If nothing else, Zero Dark Thirty confirms that director Kathyrn Bigelow is the Leni Riefenstahl of the American right. Let's start with the torture question. The first half-hour or so of the film is filled with scenes of al-Qaeda suspects being abused by CIA agents: beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, we see it all. As has been widely reported, and contrary to what's shown in the film, the hunt for Osama bin Laden wasn't helped in any way by the torture of suspects, and even Bigelow, in a letter to the Los Angeles Times answering the criticism aimed at her film, waffles in her own defense, falling back on her 1st Amendment rights "to create works of art." In other words, she's saying that it's OK to take the hard truth that torture didn't work and fictionalize it into a success story because, after all, it's just a movie. Some people would call that propaganda. I do.

So why did she distort the truth? One plausible explanation is that in cinematic terms showing scenes of torture is more dramatic, engaging and visually powerful than scene after scene of people reading transcripts and conducting briefings. The other possibility has a more political explanation and becomes apparent later in the film when two CIA agents are watching a TV interview with President Obama. In the interview, done shortly after his election, Obama announces that the U.S. will no longer use or condone torture. The agents don't react to this statement and barely pay attention to what Obama is saying. What this little scene suggests is that the CIA people in the field have no respect for Obama, and given that the early part of the film has argued that torture pays big intelligence dividends, the point of the scene becomes clearer: the film is arguing that Obama was, at best, out of touch with realities on the ground, and at worst was a hindrance in the hunt for bin Laden. But there's more. In the end phase of the hunt the decision to attack bin Laden's compound is portrayed as a decision made wholly the CIA. There's barely a hint of any presidential involvement. A quick check of the historical record shows that the pursuit of bin Laden was drastically scaled down by President Bush in 2005, who said "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." In 2008, President Obama prioritized finding and killing bin Laden, and in April 2011 it was he who gave the go-ahead for the raid on bin Laden's compound.

So it would seem that some degree of credit for the death of bin Laden should go to President Obama. Bigelow denies him this credit, and very clearly goes out of her way to make him seem like part of the problem, not part of the solution. In all the talk about the film's fallacious portrayal of torture as an effective means of intelligence gathering, little has been said about its anti-Obama political agenda. Now, I'm not American and I don't particularly like the president, so I don't, as they say, have a dog in this fight, but it seems obvious that Zero Dark Thirty attempts to downplay and disparage the Obama administration's part in the killing of bin Laden. But why should she do this? One intriguing explanation is that the high degree of official and unofficial help Bigelow got from the Pentagon and CIA came with a price: give us the glory and not that black guy none of us can stand. It's either that or Bigelow's a hardcore Republican.

Putting aside the film's function as a vehicle for disinformation, it's not as good as Bigelow's previous effort, The Hurt Locker. The chief problem is the main character, Maya, a young CIA case officer who makes it her single-minded goal in life to find bin Laden. The trouble with Maya is that she's nothing but a tightly wound ball of anger and determination. She's more of an investigation-bot than a human. Bigelow and her screenwriter are peddling the cliche that a successful woman can't express the normal range of human emotions. Maya's main co-worker, a man, is just as driven and ruthless but is given a more rounded personality. Jessica Chastain gives a good performance as Maya, but most of the time all that's required of her is that she look stern. And her abusiveness towards her superiors makes for some cheap dramatics, but in the real world it's the sort of behavior that gets people fired or reassigned.

Bigelow gets full marks for her recreation of the attack on bin Laden's compound. It generates a lot of tension, which is quite a feat since we know exactly how it's all going to play out. Bigelow shoots the action in a combination of night vision p.o.v. and near total darkness, and it's hard to imagine this sequence being done any better. As she showed in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow has filmmaking talent to burn, it's just unfortunate that it's been corrupted by a less than subtle propaganda message.

Peanuts, Popcorn & Anti-Capitalism

This post is actually a reprint, as it were, of an article I wrote for Z magazine ten years ago. I was noodling around on the web and came across it and thought it was worth adding to my blog. Z magazine features a lot of solid reporting on left-wing issues and interviews with people like Noam Chomsky. Some of the references in my article are a tad old, but the points the article makes still hold up (I hope) fairly well. Enjoy.

When President George W. Bush (among many politicians) advised Americans that an effective way to respond to September 11 was to “go to the mall,” it was made clear that the business of America, as Calvin Coolidge once put it, is business. That being said, is there any anti-capitalist rhetoric or discussion out there in the mainstream media? There is, but it's not to be found in the op-ed pages of the New York Times or on any of CNN's innumerable panel discussions featuring middle-aged suits vigorously agreeing that America is infallible. 

Have you seen the sports pages lately? Heard any sports talk radio? Watched an ESPN commentary show? That's where you'll find some of the most vituperative anti-capitalist rhetoric since Pravda folded.

Columnists, reporters, and fans use these media outlets to relentlessly vilify the major sports leagues. League officials, team owners, player agents, and the athletes are all exposed to ridicule, scorn, and contempt. Greedy, arrogant, selfish, oafish, cruel, racist, criminal, parasitic, and insane, these are just a sample of the terms fans throw at those who play and control pro sports. The basis for all this anger is almost invariably the big money in sports. 

Listen to sports radio for a few days and one quickly gets the clear impression that what helps fuel this anger is the sense of betrayal fans feel toward their favorite team or sport. Fans are, first of all, lovers of a sport. The emotional and intellectual investment a fan makes in a team represents an exploitable resource for the owners of pro sports teams. Admission prices have skyrocketed to the point where the best seats to a sports event can cost as much as a night's stay in a five-star hotel. The remaining seats are largely priced for upper middle class incomes and the cheaper seats are often monopolized by those who can afford season tickets or, if the team is popular, those who can afford scalper's prices. Television, once the great popularizer of pro sports, has progressively become more exclusive, with sports programming moving to specialty cable channels such as ESPN or pay-per-view. 

Is the anger of sports fans meaningful? Does it represent anything other than irritation with the vagaries of a favored leisure activity? For several reasons I think it does, the first being that pro sports exposes people to a portrait of capitalism without the usual scrim of corporate/governmental PR and propaganda. When NFL owners like Art Modell, Al Davis, Georgia Frontiere, and others move their teams from one city to another in return for tax breaks, subsidized or free playing facilities, and a whole package of other inducements, they aren't acting any differently than American corporations that move factories to states or other countries that offer low wages, low taxes, or other economic come-ons. The only difference is that football owners don't bother with spin control. A factory that closes in Michigan to be replaced by one in Mexico is described as “rationalization,” “strategic re-allocation of assets” or “a necessary step to stay globally competitive.” When Robert Irsay moved his tradition-rich Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis he didn't even bother with an explanation; he packed up the team's equipment and ran out of town. 

Similarly, the New York Yankees don't apologize when they snatch up the top talent from small market teams. The contracts these individual players receive can sometimes equal the entire payroll of the team the player came from. This is similar, say, to an agribusiness going into the Third World and buying up or contracting all the best land to produce “cash crops” for export while the indigenous peasantry starves for lack of arable land. The deleterious effect of these exports is papered over with talk of “aiding the balance of payments” or “bringing agricultural expertise to the underdeveloped nations of the world.” 

It seems clear that when sports fans react with rage at the actions of the Yankees and Irsays of the world, they're not just bemoaning the state of the game. Part of this fury stems from the realization that money, capital, is being used as a weapon, and a blunt one, at that. It's capitalism unmasked and a significant number of people, most of whom wouldn't describe themselves as socialists if their lives depended on it, are appalled by what they see.

Another interesting aspect of fan anger is that the public forums it finds voice in—the sports pages, phone-in shows, sports commentary TV programs—are probably the only major media-sanctioned outlets for anti-capitalist sentiment in the U.S. These outlets probably don't realize that what's being discussed would be branded as “dangerously socialist” if it appeared in a different context or forum. 

Although much of the public criticism directed at pro sports doesn't rise much above the level of name-calling, it's significant that it exists at all. It's hard to imagine a newspaper or cable channel regularly devoting a section or program to the sins of capitalism, but certainly on many days the sports media seems wholly concerned with trashing the finances and corporate structure of pro sports. 

The breadth and depth of critical comment in the sports world stands in stark relief to “regular” news. The mainstream press, for instance, has handled the Enron debacle as though it was a kind of corporate train wreck, the blame for which can be safely pinned on some rogue accountants and executives. There has been little serious discussion about Enron being the end result of willful government deregulation and a corporate culture that rewards and encourages fiscal avarice. Mainstream media chooses to portray the Enron meltdown as an aberration, albeit a spectacular one. For comparison look to the way the sports media has been handling major league baseball's plan to “contract” teams. Commentators (and fans) have been virtually unanimous in deriding baseball commissioner Bud Selig's explanation that the health of the sport depends on shedding teams, pointing out that this move is more about dividing up the TV-rights revenue pie amongst fewer teams, while at the same time dropping two teams, Montreal and Minnesota, that add virtually nothing to national TV ratings. Further, this attempted move has exposed baseball to a blizzard of critical comment on all its activities, from exorbitant free agent signings to the fan-unfriendly actions of stars. 

Capitalist indiscretions in the sports world are thoroughly and critically examined. This critical analysis pro sport receives on a near daily basis has helped create fan disenchantment and, in some cases, fan rebellion. Baseball, the major league sport most egregiously dominated by big money, has been the most seriously damaged by fan anger. In the years since the labor lockout in 1994, fan support at the turnstile and in front of the TV has declined severely, a spectacular example being the Montreal Expos, a team that now struggles to draw AAA-sized crowds 

One sure sign of growing fan disenchantment with the capitalist knife fight that pro sports has become is the number of franchises that jump from city to city looking for greenbacker pastures. Unlike the expansionist 1970s and 1980s, when new franchises and pro leagues popped up everywhere, the last ten years have seen pro sport franchises move around like a traveling carnival. Now, a handful of super-rich teams in each pro league dominate the elite player talent pool. This results in a long list of have-not teams that struggle futilely to achieve a winning record. Fans are painfully and angrily aware of this inequity 

 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the anti-capitalist bent of so many fans and sports journalists is that it creates a fertile environment in which to educate people about the larger problems created by a capitalist economy. Thanks to the mendacious and piratical behavior of pro sports, millions of fans are savvy to the ways and means a huge bankroll can stack the deck against their rooting interests and the interests of their sport. It's not a huge jump from there to show people how the capitalism that ruins their favorite team or sport can, and is, ruining lives within and without the U.S. 

Any fan who has wept over his or her team skipping town to set up in a more financially accommodating city should be able to see and understand one of the main problems of globalization; that is, the damaging effect of capital chasing cheap labor and low taxes around the world. Similarly, fans of small market teams who gnash their teeth when their team's best talent is siphoned off to major market teams would undoubtedly have a keen appreciation for the destructive power of capital in the Third World, where the most lucrative natural resources (land, minerals, oil) are largely controlled by foreign multinationals, who leave behind poverty and pollution after they've exported products and profits to the Western World. 

In these red, white and blue post-September 11 days, with media-encouraged jingoism at an all-time high, and a president and Congress that can be charitably described as corporate America's courtesans, it's somewhat comforting to realize that a rich vein of anti-capitalist emotion and thought still exists in America, even if one has to go to a sports bar to hear it. Chicken wings, anyone?       

What Makes a Conservative Conservative?

Republican or Democrat?

Have you ever wondered why someone chooses to vote Republican or Conservative? Or who agrees with the stuff that comes out of the mouths of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? Is it simply the case that some people weigh the available economic and sociological evidence and, after due consideration, decide that the right wing is the right way to go? Or is there a psychological component to being conservative, especially at the angriest, spittle-flecked end of the right-wing spectrum? It turns out there is a compelling explanation for why people work for and support right-wing political parties and causes. The answer comes in a book titled On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976) by Norman F. Dixon.

Dr. Dixon served ten years in the British Army from 1940-50 and, among other honours, became a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His book is an attempt to explain why military organizations often encourage and promote people who are intellectually incompetent or psychologically unfit for the tasks they're charged with. Here's how Dixon frames his thesis:

"How, if they are so lacking in intelligence, do people become senior military commanders? And what is it about military organizations that they should attract, promote and ultimately tolerate those whose performance at the highest levels may bring opprobrium upon the organizations which they represent?"

One of the main reasons for this situation, as Dixon explains, is that the military tends to attract people with low self-esteem, weak egos, and/or severe anxieties about disorder. A military environment gives strength and value to those who see themselves as weak or outsiders, and order and structure to those who fear freedom and disorder. Here's how Dixon explains it:

"...displayed behaviour symptomatic of extremely weak egos. In this light, their behaviour typifies the neurotic paradox in which the individual's need to be loved breeds, on the one hand, an insatiable desire for admiration with avoidance of criticism, and, on the other, an equally devouring urge for power and positions of dominance. The paradox is that those needs inevitably result in behaviour so unrealistic as to earn for the victim the very criticism which he has been striving so hard to avoid."


And:


"Incompetent commanders, it has been suggested, are often those who were attracted to the military because it promised gratification of certain neurotic needs. These include a reduction of anxiety regarding real or imagined lack of virility/potency/masculinity; defences against anal tendencies; boosts for sagging self-esteem; the discovering of loving mother-figures and strong father-figures; power, dominance and public acclaim; the finding of relatively powerless out-groups on to whom the individual can project those aspects of himself  which he finds distasteful; and legitimate outlets for, and adequate control of, his own aggression."

It's at this point that I want to extrapolate from Dixon's book the idea that what he says about the military mind and character applies equally to the right-wing mind. The two are not far apart. In fact, it would be hard to find a party or person of the right that doesn't offer vociferous support for the military or marital virtues. The most extreme form of this is fascism, in which politics becomes blended with militarism. Right-wing parties, whether it's the Republicans in the U.S. or the Conservatives in Canada and the U.K. are uniformly pro-military. These parties are quick, even eager, to undertake or urge military action, and military spending almost inevitably increases when they're in power. Dixon goes on to show that, unsurprisingly, the military also attracts authoritarian personalities:

"In the place of free-ranging, creative and inventive thought, an authoritarian's thinking is confined to rigid formulae and inflexible attitudes. He is intolerant of unusual ideas and unable to cope with contradictions...the authoritarian personality is intolerant of  ambivalence and ambiguity. Just as he cannot harbour negative and positive feeling for the same person but must dichotomize reality into loved people versus hated people, white versus black and Jew versus Gentile, so also he cannot tolerate ambiguous situations or conflicting issues. To put it bluntly, he constructs of the world an image as simplistic as it is at variance with reality."

If the above passage was creatively rephrased it could stand as an oath of allegiance for Tea Party members. The desire to reduce politics and the world to the most simplistic terms has been a hallmark of rightist politicians from the local to the international level. George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" was one example, of many, of his attempts to turn the world into an Us versus Them situation. And the current crop of GOP presidential candidates go out of their way to boil all issues down to whether something is American (capitalist, Christian, pro-family, patriotic) or un-American (socialist, godless, liberal, elitist). Sarah Palin's success amongst the rightist demographic is based largely on her simple-mindedness; they can rest assured that she has no complex or contradictory thoughts, and her opinions proceed from a simplistic and unalterable set of values.

It would also seem that politicians who are, to put it scientifically, dumber than a bag of hammers, are invariably working for the right. It's a perfect environment for them; they have self-esteem issues from knowing that they're dunces, and right-wing parties keep things simple for them with policies and slogans a sixth grader can understand. Examples of dim bulb rightists are almost too numerous to mention. But I will: the previously mentioned Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and George W. All of these people have been the butt of late-night TV humour precisely because they are stupid. Finding an equal number of high-profile left-wing politicians this dumb is almost impossible. There are leftists who promote policies or causes that could be described as flawed, futile, inefficient or wrong-headed, but it's difficult to find a lefty who's transparently a slack-jawed yokel in the way that Dubya was. This isn't to say that the left can't attract wingnuts, which it can and does, but those wingnuts usually did very well in school.

I'm not arguing that all rightists are dimwits or psychological misfits. Some could be categorized as members of the patrician class, who feel that it's the right and duty of the upper-classes to control the levers of power. George H. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller would be examples of patricians, and British political history is stuffed with this type of politician. An even larger category of rightists consists of careerists. These rightists have chosen their political path because it seems to be a quick and easy route to the top of the political ladder. Even though Barack Obama isn't a rightist (at least by American definitions), his political life story provides a fine example of a careerist at work, constantly moving onward and upward without taking a strong stand on anything in particular on the way up.

I'd love to toss out more quotes from Dixon's book but then this post would run on forever. The conclusion that can certainly be drawn from it is that one's political preference is often determined by psychological traits. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is not as dry a read as I may have made it sound. Dixon is a witty writer, and his stories of military ineptitude through the ages are fascinating and often jaw-dropping. I don't think it's still in print, but Amazon has it in Kindle format, and a good-sized library system probably has a copy or two.

Christopher Hitchens, Drunk and Sober

There's really no debate about the fact that Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant writer. His essays, opinion pieces and columns are models of logical argument, wit, and eloquence. And unlike many columnists, Hitchens backed even his most casual opinions with research. In the years to come I think he might be most remembered for leading the charge against faith-based thinking and politics. The conflict between faith and reason is not going away any time soon, and this conflict is not merely a subject for academic debate: there are real-world victims of malicious, fanatical religiosity. Hitchen's God is Not Great is an invaluable resource and weapon for anyone trying to knock down the walls of myth, superstition, and mendacity surrounding the world's major religions. It's a work that will be read up until the day religions fade away, or until the religious triumph and burn every last copy of the book. This is Hitchens at his best.

The political Hitchens, the supporter of the Iraq war and vocal opponent of various tyrants, is more problematic. Hitchens was effective and relentless in detailing the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's ayatollahs, but he never adequately faced up to the human cost of trying to remove these regimes. The Iraq war has, directly and indirectly, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and led to the exile of more than a million others. And no one is predicting that Iraq will be a viable democracy in the future. So far, the victory over Saddam Hussein has been a pyrrhic one for the Iraqi people. The human cost to the U.S. has, in relative terms, been negligible, but the economic cost has been almost as disastrous. America is becoming an also-ran in the global economy, and a large part of the reason is the bill for the Iraq war. The last American soldier left Iraq yesterday, but given the blood toll and prospects for further unrest, it doesn't look like a happy occasion for Iraq or America.

Where Hitchens seemed to go completely off the rails was with his visceral loathing of the Clintons, Bill and Hilary. He accused them of lying, financial misdeeds, cronyism, and of generally using low tactics and sharp elbows to get to the top of the greasy pole of American politics. And on one memorable occasion on Bill Maher's show, a drunk Hitchens actually accused Bill Clinton of rape. Hitchens' hatred of the Clintons made him look foolish and hypocritical. Foolish because the Clintons roughhouse political tactics (if true) are par for the course in post-war American politics. That's the way the game is played. Kennedy turned to the Mafia for political help, Nixon employed burglars, and both George and Dubya Bush ran election campaigns that set new lows for viciousness (the Willie Horton ads, Swift Boat Veterans, lies about Sen. McCain's daughter). And in terms of morals, Bill Clinton's sins don't begin to equal the immorality of the enthusiastic support Nixon and Reagan gave to death squad governments in Central and South America. The charge of hypocrisy sticks thanks to Hitchens support of George W. Bush. Bush, a southern-fried Christian creationist with a limited intellect, is the sort of person Hitchens normally scorned and mocked. In fact, on October, 9, 2000, in The Nation he called Bush an ignoramus and a "special" child. And yet on the day of Obama's Inauguration he stated in Slate that he was glad that Bush had triumphed over Gore and Kerry. Clearly, Hitchens had a conversion on the road to Damascus, or, in this case, Baghdad. It also has to be noted that he never made mention of the collateral damage caused by the Bush administration: reckless deregulation in the financial sector, tax breaks for the wealthy, a rollback of environmental protection measures, and an increased level of anti-intellectualism, something that Hitchens should have been very sensitive to. In supporting Bush, Hitchens was supporting a worldview that was fundamentally hostile to his own. Hitchens had a great intellect, but it was one that sometimes wore blinders.