The Times They Are a Changin’: The Shifting Winds of Protest Music 

   Alexander Billet 

The subject has been brought up by so many writers that by now that it’s almost cliché. It’s been asked by musicians, activists old and new, and music journalists alike. And as it’s become obvious just how devastating the US’ very presence in Iraq has become, it’s a question with a quickly growing urgency: “where are the protest songs?”

It’s not a simple question to answer. Writers are quick to call up memories of the late 60s and early 70s; the height of the movement against the Vietnam War. Duncan Campbell of the Guardian did when he wrote an article this past February as tens of thousands turned out in London and Glasgow against the occupation, and were entertained by renditions of Edwin Starr’s “War” (what is it good for…? You know the rest) and Dylan’s iconic and still-scathing “Masters of War.”

“These are all great songs,” Campbell pines, “but where is the defining anti-war anthem of today?” Campbell is by no means dismissive of the myriad artists that are putting out good, sometimes great, anti-war material. Instead, he puts forth that there has yet to be an anti-war song that “somehow captures the moment and the mood.”

Nit-picky? Maybe, but he brings up a good point. It’s not that there aren’t any protest songs. It’s that most of them aren’t on the same level as the tunes that conjure up the timeless images of rebellion from the days of the Panthers and SDS. Where is our “Masters of War,” our “What’s Going On,” our “Give Peace a Chance?”

The answer lies in the very fabric of the modern music industry, and in our readiness to take it head on. So, this weekend as tens of thousands will once again turn out all over the country to stick it to Bush and co, it’s worth taking a look around and asking ourselves if we are going to ever hear that perfect soundtrack as we march in the streets.

You Hide Behind Words, You Hide Behind Desks…

But why would any of the major outlets we get our music from ever want to bestow such an anthem upon us? MTV has all but banned most anti-war videos. System of a Down’s “Boom” was neglected airplay because it contained facts and figures about the invasion of Iraq. MIA was told that her video for “Sunshowers” would not be aired until she took out references to the PLO. And PunkVoter.com was promptly told to screw right off by MTV when they asked to advertise their Rock Against Bush compilation in 2004.

The radio dial won’t yield any better results. Since the deregulation of the airwaves ten years ago, media behemoth Clear Channel now owns around sixty percent of local stations. Bad enough in itself, but the shameless radio tyrant’s hard pro-war stance makes it even worse. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Clear Channel paid for advertising pro-war rallies in Fort Wayne, Philly, Atlanta and Cleveland, and provided the entertainment. And then, of course, there was their infamous post 9/11 do-not-play list, not to mention their ban on the Dixie Chicks.

Moves like this are especially frightening considering the company’s increasing venture into live entertainment. When one of the most outspoken and successful radical artists of our time, Ani DiFranco, played a show the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2003, Clear Channel, a main sponsor of the show, told her she would have her microphone cut off if she said anything political!

Free speech? Sorry, only for those who can afford it….

[Continues here.]

This is a ZNet Commentary.

In the two previous posts of Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer, it seems to me that Geismar is primarily critiquing the political or ideological component of Mailer’s work — which is easy to understand coming from a literary critic whose work and livelihood were threatened, then destroyed, for political, ideological reasons during the Cold War. In my view, Geismar correctly and astutely calls Mailer on these shortcomings. 

I think Armies of the Night and Executioner’s Song are highly accomplished non-fiction works, essentially, aesthetically and otherwise. However, Armies does have the political shortcomings that Geismar points out. From a broad political point of view it is largely disappointing, empty. 

Otherwise (not focusing solely on the political), I think the best of Mailer’s nonfiction is very good, and an order of magnitude better than the best of his fiction. Mailer has high regard for his second novel Barbary Shore and that happens to be his only novel that much works for me. That said, I scarcely remember a thing about the ideas in Barbary Shore. If trying to work as allegory the novel seemed to me to fail to engage, or to be slight, but I did find engaging and curious the day-in and day-out self trials of the young writer/narrator’s thought. 

All in all, I think Geismar profiles Mailer perceptively. Mailer is a weak novelist and a politically limited nonfiction writer. In his nonfiction (and Barbary Shore), Mailer can be especially exciting and perceptive, and thus he became one of the leading writers. However I think Geismar is correct in pointing out that much of the early influence of Mailer, aside from the commercial success of The Naked and the Dead, came from the cult of personality that Mailer cultivated before his writing skills matured and were displayed best at book-length in the late sixties with Armies of the Night, two decades after The Naked and the Dead, and seemingly after many more decades of hype that Geismar usefully cuts to size. 

Geismar could give more credit to the liveliness and aesthetic accomplishment of Armies of the Night and some of Mailer’s other nonfiction, but, again, Mailer’s fiction, with little exception, has always been rather weak in my view, as in Geismar’s (and that of many others) and Geismar is correct to point out some limits of the political vision of Mailer’s celebrated works. Those are real problems for art and society both – quite evident in one of the better writers, and certainly one of the most renowned, of the time.

 Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer in his memoir Reluctant Radical (continued from Part One):

What I couldn’t understand was that given the conditions of Mailer’s career, how could he become such a huge literary influence on his time? How could he be described as the contemporary equivalent of Hemingway?

It made no sense to me, as I say, and I hardly paid any attention to Mailer’s developing reputation, until I realized that this reputation and literary stature had grown so much that people — especially young authors — were swallowing it. He was the influence on his generation, far more than Styron or Jones. Writers of the sixties were taking him seriously, having known nothing better.

I remember one evening when we had gone with our friend Jakov Lind to see a Joseph Papp production of the original rock musical Hair. Papp was also about to produce one of Jakov’s books in play form, so the evening was a gala one for us. Then Jakov proposed we go to another party, being given after the first production of a play which later became famous, The Beard. The play was being produced by Jakov’s publisher at the time, Barney Rosset, of Grove Press, then at the height of his fame, with his imported blue movies like I Am Curious Yellow and his new plays. The party was near the Grove Press offices and was a rather fancy late evening affair given while waiting for the first reviews of the play.

I was seated across from a young man in a mod-cowboy outfit whom I assumed to be one of the actors in the play. He started to rave about Norman Mailer. I listened awhile in silence and then finally said: “No!” He responded. “No, what?” “Mailer is not all that good,” said I. “What?” said my cowboy friend, and we were in the midst of so furious an argument that I finally decided to terminate it by getting up and leaving the table. Looking back, I heard my Wild West friend ask loudly: “Who is that character?” And I heard Anne [Geismar] answer him: “He’s just another obscure author like you!”

It was in fact Michael McClure, the author of The Beard. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Norman Mailer, for better or for worse, and it caused me to think and to watch for other young writers who shared this same adulation for Mailer. The problem of Mailer’s preeminence on the contemporary literary scene, and his impact on American authors, continued to occupy my thoughts. And it was only just recently, reading an essay sent to me by a New Left academic, Robert Meredith, whom I knew through his work on Truman Nelson, that I began to get the story straight.

The admiration of a group of young writers for Mailer, and of some older critics, stems from just those traits that my critical standards had found wanting. Meredith, a product of the sixties, tells of his early infatuation with Mailer as a major influence on the period and on the New Left itself.

The key book in this was Advertisements for Myself. “My god!” I wondered while reading this. “Did they take this book seriously?”

According to Meredith’s essay, printed in Modern Fiction Studies, they had indeed. “Since 1959, appropriately on the verge of a new decade,” Meredith had written, “thousands of readers, mostly students, have been psychically and politically turned on not so much by Mailer’s qualities as a writer in Advertisements, not so much by Mailer’s qualities as he describes himself in Armies of the Night…as by…”

By what? I thought. “…as by Mailer’s confessional projection of himself as Hemingway’s successor, a personage, a romantic image of a writer attempting out of existential depths to tell the complex masculine truth about himself and his time.”

Mailer compared himself to Walt Whitman. He said he had been thinking for ten years of running for president of the United States. He confided he was imprisoned “with a perception” that would settle for nothing less “than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” But as to what kind of revolutionary consciousness Mailer was seeking to create, neither he nor Meredith seems to clarify.

Mailer compared himself in Advertisements to Truman Capote, James Jones, and Jack Kerouac, as well as to Hemingway. He talked about “our totalitarian time,” in which he was correct, and compared it with his “creative rage” — which, however beneficial to the artist, is no satisfactory political alternative to totalitarianism.

What Mailer displays in Armies of the Night is not even so much a concern for his idea of himself as a concern for his image. And this concern either for self or for image is at the opposite pole from radical or revolutionary thought. How could Armies of the Night, an antiwar critique still dominated by Cold War ideology and by Mailer’s own ego-posturing, how could such a book be characterized by serious reviewers as a masterpiece, comparable to the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Henry Adams, Faulkner, Henry James, and Scott Fitzgerald?

What Armies of the Night did, in fact, was to swallow the radical protest whole and regurgitate it, half consumed, as a synthetic radical manifesto of the period. But to those who educated themselves, whose radicalism was genuine, he became a mockery. If he did survive in the national letters it would be as another, luminous example of the literary fakery that characterized the Cold War era. Seduced by and a victim of that corrupt period, during which a dishonest society aped the mores of a lost and long-gone American democracy, he became a parody of all that we had once believed in.

Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer (part one)

From Maxwell Geismar’s memoir: Reluctant Radical —

Norman Mailer was never part of our lives as were the [William] Styrons and the [James] Joneses, but we did see him around and he was always associated in my mind with the same group of writers who emerged in the fifties….

…

I had already reviewed The Naked and the Dead in the Saturday Review in 1949, and Barbary Shore in the same magazine in 1951, and would write about The Deer Park (1955) in American Moderns. I had praised Mailer’s first novel while noting it was consciously literary and derived from such writers as Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos…. I had panned Barbary Shore as being a novel of ideas that were “fashionable by current standards” but that were also mistaken….

As early as this second book Mailer had cut himself off from the revolutionary currents of the world historical scene around him. Becoming as he did one of the sharpest critics of American capitalism, knowing it was a corrupt and rotten social system — as he said over and over again — he had no feasible alternative to what he was condemning.

Hence his own work became infested with the corruption he was describing. Even more important, all that he could place against this decadent society was the solitary image of himself apart from it. Apart, but basically no different from it in his motivation and his literary achievement. In turn that treacherous ego of Mailer’s would increase and enlarge itself into monstrous proportions.

That was the mistake I sensed in Barbary Shore as far back as 1951. Mailer was far smarter than either Styron or Jones in seeing what was wrong around him, but that intellectual brilliance was supported by no vision or ideological framework.

As a social critic, Mailer was also a failed novelist. That special poison, which can paralyze a creative personality, also contaminated his other writing, his values, and his personality. In this sense Mailer’s career can be described as one long ego trip designed to keep the failure of the artist away from the artist’s own consciousness.

[Geismar on Mailer continued in the next Geismar post]

 

When the current editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel’s father, William vanden Heuvel, tag-teamed with current regular FOX political pundit William Kristol’s father Irving Kristol (who has come to be known as the “father of American neoconservatism”) – when these two figures of the social and political establishment hastened to appear on national TV over four decades ago to attack directly to the face of the silenced progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar, on the occasion of the publication of his book of criticism about Henry James (“a primary Cold War literary figure”), Kristol and vanden Heuvel, two exemplars of the status quo, serving the retrograde interests of the state, executed a prominent role in destroying Geismar’s highly accomplished literary career and ending his run on a national literary television show, Books on Trial (“or something similar,” in Geismar’s recollection).

Geismar posits William vanden Heuvel as “a rich, cultivated, charming, and liberal member of the upper echelons of the CIA [who] had a large hand in embroiling [the U. S.] in Vietnam,” while Irving Kristol “as it later turned out was almost always affiliated with many State Department or CIA literary projects in editing, publishing, and the academic world…a hired hand of the establishment.”

This combined liberal and reactionary political literary attack against the increasingly progressive literary stalwart Maxwell Geismar, having occurred on national TV no less, is one of the most significant moments in all of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century – yet it remains virtually unknown. Details may be found in Geismar’s decades-delayed, invaluable memoir, Reluctant Radical (2002).

Along with the trajectory of Maxwell Geismar’s career and vital latter work, similarly shot down the memory hole are several landmark books of progressive literary criticism from the first half of the twentieth century. Sheer scandal is the burial of Upton Sinclair’s studied book of economic literary criticism, Mammonart (1924). Another inexcusable and great loss is the virtual disappearance of two other landmarks of progressive literary criticism – V. F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature (1932) and Bernard Smith’s Forces in American Criticism (1939).

It’s difficult to be ignorant of these three landmark books and yet be able to fully appreciate Kenneth Burke’s tremendous collection of 1930’s essays, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book that in a sense consummates the progressive literary tradition, among others, of the 1930s and of the preceding several decades as well.

Ignorance of the three landmark books by Sinclair, Calverton, and Smith makes it similarly difficult to understand the significance and tremendous isolation and direct political persecution of the once prominent (when liberal) accomplished literary critic Maxwell Geismar, as he was marginalized and forgotten through the sixties and seventies and today – especially as he worked increasingly with white and black progressives and revolutionaries, and wrote ever more about progressive and reactionary aspects of American literature and culture.

Overall, it’s difficult to be ignorant of the three early books of criticism (still almost entirely disappeared, despite much renewed interest in the 1930s) and yet be able to make full sense of the especially vital socially engaged critical tradition prior to the 1940s that was forcefully curtailed in the subsequent decades. Despite some progressive accomplishments and gains of recent decades, these crucial books remain buried, no matter their integral nature to the most vital literary strains of their time, and no matter the extreme degree of need for them in our time.

Other, sometimes better known, notable works in a crucial progressive literary tradition date back at least to Frank Norris’ The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903) and extend to Emma Goldman’s rather mild book of theater reviews, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), then continue on through John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism (1937) – and are found in progressive criticism by W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke, Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, and so on – heading into the 1940s with works that include Edmund Wilson’s highly useful overview essay “The Historical Interpretation of Literature” (1940), and Alex Comfort’s Art and Social Responsibility (1946), and on into the 1950s and ’60s with Maxwell Geismar’s incisive line-in-the-sand book, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (1958), followed by his lucid and controversial critique, Henry James and the Jacobites (1963), the book that led immediately to that nationally televised yet unknown watershed moment.

At a time when the influence of T. S. Eliot’s ostensible critical views continues to hold something akin to preeminent sway in so many poetry workshops, hand in glove with a similar ethos throughout many creative writing programs and other literary institutions, Bernard Smith’s comprehensive study and analysis of literary movements, capped by critical comments on Eliot’s views, could help clarify, and advance, a lot of creative and critical thought. With Eliot (as with the “New Critics,” as Gordon Hutner notes in his anthology of classic American literary criticism American Literature, American Culture), many people would be surprised at how deeply – and in Eliot’s case, utterly – invested in religious (and retrograde) ideology such highly and widely admired “literary” thought is.

In the meantime, some of the most vital books of American literature – if not, interestingly, the time period in which they flourished – have been shoveled under. Some offspring of the progressive literary understandings explored in these landmark books are alive of course, and in fact in ever more diverse ways, but they are disconnected from crucial intellectual roots (not excluding passing mentions in the high quality work by Michael Denning, Barbara Foley, Vincent Leitch, and others) roots that could provide more power, focus, and energy to the somewhat progressive creative and critical efflorescence of today that is ironically and unfortunately often spotty and thin, and, as always, under attack, and subject to quite effective suppression, conscious and otherwise – not least from within the literary establishment itself.

—–

(As James Petras points out, in this related link: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited)

Two.

One to destroy Iraq with sanctions.

The other to destroy Iraq with bombs.

And someone else to do the work that needs done.

Review of “Still the Monkey” by Alivia C. Tagliaferri

   Ryan D. Beardsley

The impact of war is something that, when experienced first-hand, will leave a lasting impression forever on the mind of a soldier.

Those who do not personally witness the horrors of war will never fully comprehend the impact that such an emotional time has on a soldier’s psyche.

Williamsport native and author Alivia C. Tagliaferri is attempting to help civilians understand the impact of war on soldiers and the issue of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in her first novel, “Still the Monkey: What Happens to Warriors after War.”

Tagliaferri, a history major and a 1999 graduate of Penn State University, said she began writing the historical fiction novel in November 2003 as her way of supporting the troops the best way that she knew how — by writing.

“My goal was, and still is, to help friends and families of veterans better understand how their loved ones may change physically, mentally and spiritually after the traumatic experience of war,” Tagliaferri said. “I’m trying to help society understand the mental anguishes and the awareness I’ve discovered through researching PTSD.”

“Still the Monkey” tells the story of a Vietnam War veteran, Dennis Michaels, who has been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for the past 25 years following the war. Michaels visits the Walter Reed’s Mologne House and walks into the life of Andrew Taylor, a casualty of the War in Iraq from a IED explosion that claimed both of his legs.

Together the warriors spend 10 days exploring the consequences of living with PTSD, the realities of survivor’s guilt, the morbid detachment of the “Body Bag Syndrome,” the nightmares and the pain that never seems to go away, according to the novel’s profile.

Tagliaferri didn’t start out to write a novel on PTSD, but actually began writing “Still the Monkey” as a screenplay.

After watching a television program on Vietnam vets reaching out and mentoring young wounded vets at Walter Reed and across the country, she found that she could better incorporate the present-day conflict, psyche of her characters and reach out to the young warriors of today and their friends and families as well as the older generation of combat veterans by writing the story as a novel.

Tagliaferri said that her passion for the novel began after visiting Walter Reed Hospital and seeing first-hand the reality and consequences of shrapnel and IED wounds.

“Reading reports in newspapers — black words on a white page — could not compare with what I saw at the hospital,” she said. “I will never forget that far-off look on the faces of the amputees who sat out on the hospital porch in their wheelchairs.”

Tagliaferri then took inspiration after she met a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who had been battling PTSD for many years. Although she took actual accounts from the veteran, the novel and its characters are still a work of historical fiction.

“The novel was partially inspired by a former marine who shared his stories of fighting for his country in Vietnam and of his 40-year battle against PTSD,” Tagliaferri said. “While the chronology of events in Vietnam historically accurate and the Vietnam veterans’ experiences whom I interviewed are recounted, many characters and scenes were created or dramatized wholly out of my imagination, as was the character of Andrew Taylor.”

Tagliaferri interviewed the former Marine and Vietnam veteran over a period of three months, developing a better understanding of the psyche of warriors and the life-long implications of PTSD.

According to Tagliaferri, the novel’s title comes from an Eastern philosophy that the mind is like a monkey, and that left unchecked or untrained, will swing from branch to branch, from the past to the future, never staying still long enough to live in the present moment.

“So the monkey is a metaphor for PTSD, as I’ve come to understand it,” she said.

She also uses the common phrase, “the monkey on your back” as a metaphor for PTSD as well as the Vietnamese zodiac symbol of the monkey representing great transformation and change.

Writing the novel took a toll on Tagliaferri’s emotional state as well, and she admitted that she had her share of sleepless nights while writing the novel.

“It was a cathartic experience,” she said. “I would wake up with nightmares. Writing the scenes that were very gritty, sad and dark, those are always the hardest to write. I would try and procrastinate those scenes throughout the day, but at night when I couldn’t sleep was when those chapters would get finished. Once I got it out and down on paper I was able to remove myself emotionally and get back to sleep.”

The finished product is now set to be published March 16. Although Tagliaferri hasn’t had any official feedback from critics yet, she has received positive responses from friends and families of veterans who requested an advance copy.

“I don’t know what type of commercial success it will receive,” she said. “But having those type of personal reviews really meant a lot to me. I also had a lot of love and support from my family and friends who enabled me to do this.”

Tagliaferri will do a book signing from 5 to 8 p.m. March 16 at Otto Book Store. She is currently working on her next project, “Understanding PTSD,” a manual that discusses how friends and families can best support returning vets deal with PTSD in a positive manner.

She also is looking forward to beginning her next book, which she said will be “a lot more light-hearted.”

“Still the Monkey” is published by Ironcutter Media and retails at $18.95.

Review of David Corbett’s “Blood of Paradise”

   Patrick Anderson

This is, in part, a political novel. Corbett believes that, despite the long and bloody civil warand the 1992 peace accords, El Salvador is still ruled by a few rich families who use rigged elections, corrupt police and unrelenting violence to maintain their power, and who are supported by the U.S. military-intelligence complex. His characters see El Salvador as an eventual staging ground for a U.S. invasion of Venezuela to oust President Hugo Chavez and seize the oil resources there. If these notions offend you, if you prefer to see El Salvador as a glowing example of how our nation exports democracy, you won’t like “Blood of Paradise.”

Nielsen and Film Profile

   Paul Liberatore 

“Congress is trying to decide how to leave Iraq and undo this mess that cannot be undone,” she said, her voice inflected with a faint Danish accent. “It’s incredibly important for everyone to try to find out what’s going on over there as much as possible. I think our movie is trying to give as wide open a portrait of the situation there as we possibly can.”

Director Philip Haas (“Angels and Insects,” “Up at the Villa”) shot “The Situation” in 2004 on location in Morocco on a minuscule budget of $1.4 million, which would just about cover the catering bill for a Hollywood blockbuster.

It’s clear that this film was a labor of love for him, Nielsen and the crew, many of whom were volunteers – technical people who were shooting the studio picture “Babel” in another part of Morocco at the same time that Haas was filming “The Situation,” donating their services to him.

…

Sean Penn, who has been to Iraq twice and reported on what he saw there, spoke at a special screening of “The Situation” at the Rafael Film Center for members of the San Francisco Film Institute. He pronounced it “very authentic.”

“What struck me is how real it is,” he said. “It brings the Iraq that I saw to the screen.”

…

Nielsen has another politically charged movie, “Battle in Seattle,” again an independent film, this one about the World Trade Organization protests, set to come out in the spring or summer. Coincidentally, she plays another journalist, this time a cynical TV reporter spinning “a corporate kind of truth.”

…

An Activist Returns to the Novel

   Randeep Ramesh

This is a good article about Arundhati Roy’s literary and political thoughts. Of note:

Sitting in her Delhi rooftop flat, whose dark tiled and light wood-lined interior the former architecture student designed, Roy says she has already begun writing the new novel but has no idea when it will be finished. The whisper was that it would be about Kashmir, the revolt-scarred Himalayan state, but Roy shakes her head sending ripples through her grey-flecked curls. “It is not true. My fiction is never about an issue. I don’t set myself some political task and weave a story around it. I might as well write a straightforward nonfiction piece if that is what I wanted to do.”

Of course, some novelists and other artists do create both accomplished and effective works that “set…some political task and weave a story around it” — e.g., Jonathan Swift in A Modest Proposal, etc, and Victor Hugo in Les Miserables.

Doing so may simply not be Roy’s talent or interest. But obviously it has been and continues to be well done — in myriad ways that function as “intervention,” to use Roy’s word.

Interview with Martin Espada

Demetria Martínez

La Bloga

Iraq in Books

   Michael Rubin 

The Iraq war has pumped adrenaline into the publishing industry. Whereas five years ago, few bookstores included any selections on Iraq, today dozens of Iraq books line the shelves.

That’s strange — no news of the anti Iraq War novel, Homefront. Or of any other such novel. I haven’t the faintest idea why. Maybe James Petras knows?

I think someone needs to propose A Practical Policy for the ever-vigilant publishing industry, both liberal and conservative, as well as for the liberal engaged novel award, the Bellwether Prize — which gave its most recent prize to a novel about the French and Indian, I mean WWII.

Oh, and we need a PP for Hollywood, as usual.

Iraq War novels — have they been banned? No. No need to.

Ah, well, what’s the point?

MAINSTAY PRESS

Iraq War Films: Fact of Fiction?
   Felicia Feaster

America’s most significant 20th century conflicts, from World War I through the Vietnam War, have been defined in cinematic form by narrative films, from All Quiet on the Western Front and The Best Years of Our Lives to The Deer Hunter. (These more complicated films, as opposed to more propagandist works, have come after the war.)

By comparison, narrative films about Iraq have been scarce. Perhaps this dearth of narrative films about Iraq may be that because the conflict is still so fresh, the documentary genre – with its trademark immediacy – somehow is more suitable. It also may be that in the face of the Bush administration’s once successful efforts to shape public opinion about and support for the war, filmmakers feel a greater onus in exploring the complexities of a war that the mainstream media has until recently tiptoed around.

This weekend marks the release of films from both genres, exploring the war’s impact: Philip Haas’ narrative feature The Situation and James Longley’s Oscar-nominated documentary Iraq in Fragments. Viewed side by side, these two films deal with similar content: daily violence, ethnic division, and the Iraqis’ uneasy relationship with American occupiers.

Yasmin Hernandez

Donna Hernandez     Colorlines

What is the role of the artist in changing the political landscape? How does your work do this?

For the artists who choose this path, our role is to expose injustice. A single painting cannot save anyone but can serve as a catalyst to evoke a change in someone to begin the work that can indeed save us.With my own work, I seek to fill voids with innovative methods of presenting the images we don’t usually see, but should. I paint brown goddesses because young women of color often have trouble viewing themselves as sacred. I paint mothers as saints because the everyday woman is worthy of praise. I paint freedom fighters because today we are taught that to resist is to be a troublemaker and that to go against the powers that be when we are in disagreement is to be ungrateful. I paint the harsh realities in a world that masks truth behind a bling-bling generation.

 Killing Our Troops Slowly: Deja Vu All Over Again

   Michael O’McCarthy

Twenty-five years ago, March 14, 1981 Jim Hopkins, Marine veteran of Vietnam, born on the Marine Corps birthday of November 10, drove his army Jeep through the glass doors and into the lobby of the multi-million dollar, showcase edifice of Wadsworth VA hospital, at Los Angeles, California. He did so to protest the gross, willfully negligent treatment given US veterans within the VA system. In specific, those veterans of the US war in South East Asia, aka, the Vietnam War. 

He fired rounds from his AR 14 into the official pictures of then Republican President Ronald Reagan and Ex-President Jimmy Carter. For emphasis he then fired his .45 caliber handgun and a shotgun screaming that he was not receiving the medical attention needed. Hauled from the hospital by law enforcement, he screamed into the cameras that his brain was “being destroyed by Agent Orange.” That sent both a shock wave and a wake up call through the US and became a clarion call to thousands of veterans who felt the very same as did
Hopkins.

…

In 1989 Oliver Stone made Kovic’s book into a movie starring a remarkable Oscar winning performance with Tom Cruise playing Kovic. But neither the Congress nor the Presidency changed the continuing ill treatment given veterans. Then under Reagan’s pet Republican successor George Herbert Walker Bush, the US launched Operation Desert Storm and its use of depleted uranium nuclear weapons. Vets came home from that US victory complaining of various kinds of poisoning, both from the depleted uranium and the suspected effects of chemical warfare allegedly used by Sadam Hussein’s forces. It’s called Gulf War Syndrome and the military and the VA immediately began denying any causal relationship to the vet’s complaints and those weapons. Thus, little changed. When we look at the scandal of Bldg 18 where the Washington Post reported that “part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses…” we know that nothing has changed. Today it is undeniable that those who mastermind those callous, destructive wars against the poor people of the world have the very same callous disregard for the health and welfare our working and poor people sent to fight their wars. In a nation where profit rules over healthcare how can one avoid the reality that this government cares not for it people but only the power of profit? It no longer can. The war against the people of South East Asia was a war based on a President’s lie: an attack on the US in the Gulf of Tonkin that never occurred. It is in that way akin to that of the current President; based on the lies of an obviously mentally incompetent madman far more concerned with the false righteousness of his crusader’s mission and as it suits his petroleum industry masters than concern for the American people. 

As the great anti-war movies All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, Johnny Got His Gun, Coming Home, and Born On The Fourth of July has proved time and time again: governments use poor and working people as their cannon fodder, discarding those that survive as they do their junk military weaponry, while the manufacturing engines of war, profit and outlive war. 

For over 4 years news stories have addressed the Bush-Republican cuts in the VA budget. Simultaneously, the dollar amount spent by Bush-Republicans has risen to an extent beyond any war ever fought, including WWII. At the same time the profits of the military-industrial-media complex have grown exponentially with the war budget increases. Simultaneously the number of injured veterans has outgrown the VA’s negligently conceived plan of treatment and as a result. This is in keeping with the malevolent attitude of Bush-Cheney…the two are married in purpose.

…

Fast Food Nation
   Daniel Fienberg

It was late September, and there was shit in our spinach.

That’s what the media was saying, spinning elaborate tales of improper cleaning and an entire crop of untraceable green leafy veggies corrupted with E. coli. There aren’t many conversations in which misplaced fecal matter is an appropriate segue, but in the context of Richard Linklater’s new film Fast Food Nation, it makes perfect sense. Eric Schlosser’s exhaustively researched and disgustingly detailed report into the way Americans eat and live didn’t seem an obvious cinematic target–it’s more statistics and footnotes than overarching narrative and sympathetic characters–but Linklater has become a man prone to unexpected choices.

In the past three years, Texas’ Slacker Bard has made a kid-friendly story about rock music in public schools, an Oscar-nominated sequel to one of his most beloved movies, a remake of a profane ’70s baseball classic and an animated version of a supposedly unfilmable sci-fi classic. Given that Linklater has succeeded more often than he’s failed, it’s no wonder that his low-budget saga of immigration, factory safety and not-so-humane cattle slaughter was still able to attract a cast that includes Bruce Willis, Patricia Arquette, Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, Wilmer Valderrama and Oscar nominees Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Ethan Hawke.

The result is Slacker meets Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a loosely structured piece of agitprop that demands a powerful and visceral reaction. Some people will lament the plight of cows and minimum wage workers, but folks on the other side of the political spectrum may take umbrage at what could certainly be read as an attack on capitalism and at the state of contemporary American culture. It’s an intricately told sociology lesson that concludes with a sure-to-be-notorious killing room floor sequence with enough sloughed off fat, bulging intestines and arterial spray to cause even the most carnivorous of diners to give a second thought to that Whopper.

They’re coming after John Doe Dimslow Junior at school. Now with the deaths of Iraqi guerillas and civilians and U.S. soldiers and private mercenaries mounting every day, U.S. military recruiters are having trouble recruiting soldiers into the “all-volunteer” forces. So they have to make it more and more a mercenary military of Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine troops to go along with the private mercenaries. They have to offer cash to kill: “$20,000 bonus for enlisting, $9,000 more if enlistees ship out in the next 30 days, and even better, $70,000 for college.” 

The big bucks tempted J Junior so much that he gave the recruiters the a-okay to come over to our home for a home visit. Except he never cleared it with Daddy-O, one John Doe Dimslow. So when those recruiters climbed out of their shiny SUV and came striding across the lawn and up the walk I met them on the porch with a twelve gauge double barrel sawed-off, and I ordered them to stop, to halt, to cease and desist. And then I asked them if they recognized what I held in my hands. They did. And then I stepped off the porch and pointed up at the sky over the empty field and woods and gave it a shooting off. And I don’t know if they were impressed none but at least now I had their attention. “Come on in, boys,” I told them. “Let’s have us a little talk. And I’ll just keep my friend here by my side.”  

Well them boys ain’t soldiers for nothing, I suppose, so they came on in, and we sat around the kitchen table with J Junior and his mother Jane Doe Dimslow and I had them boys go over the dollars again, and then I asked, “And how much does J Junior here get for a blown off arm and a blown off leg? I mean, does he get paid an arm and a leg for an arm and a leg that’s been blown off? And how many arms and legs is he going to have to blow off himself to get them bucks? And how much more of that oil money is he going to get?” And then I turned to J Junior and I asked, “How much of that oil money do you want, son? I figure now’s the time to ask for all the world and all to hear. Name your price to these gentlemen and see just how much you can get.”

And J Junior said, “Well, I don’t know anything about oil money.” 

And I said, “Well, these boys do. They get their share. Now you’ve got to get yours, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want? Oil money? And blood spilt to get it? You better get what you can now, I tell you what, because it’s going to be like trying to pull teeth trying to get any later. Them fat cats are going to lap it all up, quicker than you can pull any trigger.” 

J Junior said he didn’t want any oil money. 

And I turned to the recruiters and I said, “You heard the young man.” And smiled. And we all just sort of ignored any guns that had been brought to the table and the blood and the oil, and the recruiters went out onto the porch and strode down the walk and crossed the yard and climbed in their SUV and drove away. 

After I locked the gun in the cabinet, J Junior and I stood on the porch gazing out over the fields and forest, and J Junior said, “The money makes you think.” 

And I said, “Is that what it does?” 

And J Junior said, “It makes you think their way.”  

And I said, “And what kind of way is that?”  And J Junior said, “It’s the way of the killer.” “The killer thief,” I said, and I turned around as Jane Doe Dimslow came out onto the porch. 

And J Junior said, “And that’s no way. It’s no way at all.”

And it’s all over the dim-damned TV. All these phony political dee-bates that get me all riled up under the skin the way them warhawks get going and all. It isn’t nothing how they look, it’s what they say. They all say we got to destroy Iraq to save it. More or less. And to hell with anything else. To hell with riling up them mad bombers, which is what it does more and more. To hell with everything – they say, we got to up the firepower on Iraq to have peace. We got to break it to fix it. We got to smash it to restore it.

Maybe I’m missing the candle for the wick, being a John Doe Dimslow and all, but these guys are nuts gone mad, warhawks all, blowing up Iraq, blowing up Iraqis and using our boys and girls, men and women as the cannon and the cannon fodder both. Pouring gasoline on a bonfire, all so that we, but not me and you, can own the oil and threaten to cut if off from other folks, rather than just keep buying it like everyone else. The troops ain’t dying and killing for nothing, of course. There’s oil there! And power! And a WMD hornet’s nest is what we’re a-makin’, by a-killin’ and by a-stayin’. And somebody not no way related to John Doe Dimslow is getting rich. That’s what them troops are dying and killing for, as the place goes to the hell it’s being made into. And more than a few of them troops know it and are angry about it. And for starters we can thank the big dollar folks and politicians and big media types like the ones we see all over the damn place for making it so. 

But what do I know, old Dimslow?

Maybe I can find a horror film on TV to watch tonight or something like that, something a little less chilling than them warhawks I see on TV chirping and pounding away at each other like they are cannons come to life, each one eager to be a bigger cannon than the other. 

If only them warhawks could be confined there on the tube – but now I hear Iran is next for the blasting and smashing – and soon. It’s the whole planet and everyone in it that I get worried about, that I got to speak out about, that them two warhawks seem eager to set about destroying. They act like they’ll destroy almost anything to get elected or stay in power. And the thing is, it don’t, in any way, seem like no act.

 

 ————————————————————————

 (Warhawk Guns For Hire, by Tony Christini)

“Images of Tehran, Iran you don’t see everyday”
Video set to Cat Stevens’ Peace Train — by Lucas Gray