Warren Buffett in a bad year, takes a big loss in Omaha
So did Columbus, Nebraska
G7 meets in Pittsburgh
Galveston, Oct 2008
Detroit
Hummer in Afghanistan
Protesting Obama school talk
Let that which stood in front go behind, Let that which was behind
advance to the front. Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new
propositions. Let the old propositions be postponed.
Late July, dog days of summer. On the news the doldrums arrive, lazy waves on a calm sea. Beneath this the usual commotion proceeds: more troops to Afghanistan under cover of new words for old thoughts. We’ll pacify them, bring them the glories of democracy, build schools. 30 US dead this past month, we aren’t told how many others we killed in this pursuit, and whatever the numbers they’d be false. Meantime JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs celebrate, having converted the financial panic of autumn into a fiscal killing a mere 8 months later. Capitalizing on panic, like a gang war, they rubbed out, with some help from Washington, some major competitors. Now these two sit on the peak of Wall Street, raking in the money and shelling out billions in reward to those inside the game. Unemployment rises each month, the funny figures jiggled by the statisticians so the official number is 10% for the US, though the real one is likely far closer to more than 20%. The jobs vanish, and politicians promise renewal, but the work is gone and there’s little real reason to think it’ll be replaced any time soon. The celebrated shift to a “service economy” has tanked, the 70% of GDP generated by “consumption” suddenly shrivelled with diminished plastic and heightened extortionary interest rates. Meanwhile Michael is dead, after much distracting hooplah, and now Walter Cronkite, and new news rolls in. On Washington’s C Street, an alleged Christian retreat for hardpressed politicians turns out to have been a love-nest for errant hypocritical Republican “family values” Senators and Representatives. Elmer Gantry is America.
Obama slowly tarnishes, as it becomes clear this Knight in burnished bronze is only the best the political system could offer, but it is still inside the system, and the system is gamed by those of the military-industrial complex intent on keeping and expanding America’s imperium, 700 bases – and building – scattered across the globe. The whiff of Roman decadence becomes a stench. The prison at Bagram in Afghanistan is a political embarassment so the PR machine cranks about the “bad image” and not the actual substance of the matter: that America, in pursuit of its ugly interests, hesitates not to imprison, torture and kill in the most casual of manners. Caesar would be proud. The Romans poisoned themselves with lead linings to their aquaducts; we follow suit with plastic water bottles leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) into us, dicking with our hormones. Our domestic economy wilts as we pour more and more into armaments and money-shufflers, and Obama orates with a silver tongue speaking as his masters dictate. Were he to actually attempt to take on his commanders in the Pentagon, CIA or Wall Street, he’d be gone as a lynching victim in August.
Marion, Indiana, 1930
On August 6th, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb in combat on Hiroshima, Japan
“We need to take our hands off the handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point,” Maj. Gen. David G. Perkins, the chief American military spokesman, said Monday.
George Bellows
American naive, at National Gallery
Walker Evans
Gary Winogrand
Philip Guston
Martin Heade
J-M Basquiat
Joel Sternfeld
Frank Gehry does blast walls
de Tocqueville:
“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
“In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.”
“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”
In the past brief month and a half there was a US Presidential inauguration, a handful of skittering little political scandals, a wave of panic over the collapsing global economy, and a constant drumbeat of negative fiscal news. Some million plus Americans lost their jobs in those 6 weeks; surely millions of others gave up hopes of finding work. The official unemployment stands around 7%, though most officials understand these figures are unreal, the method of measurement having been jiggled way back in Jimmy Carter’s day, in order to help mask the unhappier truth. Real unemployment is something closer to 15%, and in places like California edging on 20%. To say, we’re in a most predictable pickle, though our experts, as usual, missed this one by a mile. Of course, those experts – like Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Geithner had certain self-interests helping them miss the signs of trouble coming up the track – they were making tens of millions with the system gamed as it was.
But, of course, behind every darkening cloud, there’s a silver lining for someone.
Suddenly it seems as if everyone is going to the movies, with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion, according to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.
And it is not just because ticket prices are higher. Attendance has also jumped, by nearly 16 percent. If that pace continues through the year, it would amount to the biggest box-office surge in at least two decades.
Americans, for the moment, just want to hide in a very dark place, said Martin Kaplan, the director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment and society at the University of Southern California.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “People want to forget their troubles, and they want to be with other people.”
Of course the films of choice do not wrestle with the real problems these audiences are trying to escape; quite the opposite. Slumdog Millionaire (which I have not seen), contrives to paint a rosy scenario out of the depths of Mumbai poverty. [My friend Dennis Grunes reports that to add insult to injury, the film's co-director, Loveleen Tandon, an Indian woman who clearly had a major hand in directing the Indian children, showing a touch ever lacking in Mr Boyle's work, was totally excluded from the Oscar recognition, showing perhaps the impacted colonialist mentality that still quivers in the English (Scots in this case) heart.] It’s been suggested that this film became a hit owing to its unintended timely resonance with today’s financial realities. Which is to say that while Americans supposedly voted for “change you can believe in” when confronted with the reality of the cumulative effects of their own behavior – running up credit card, student loan, mortgage debts so high they’ll never pay them off, while accepting the quantum leap equivalent in the stock market (don’t wanna look too hard at how those gazillions are being made…) – they show that deep down inside they really want to keep things like their imagined normal: get lucky at Vegas or on American Idol and for minimum input come out a billionaire with no effort. So Hollywood profits by merely sucking up the psychological consequences of its own socially derelict product, the dream factory rolls on cranking out more delusions, more future troubles, playing out its role as a metaphor for everything wrong about American culture. Of course it is one of the country’s most lucrative exports, along with arms and corporately farmed food stuffs.
By coincidence the other night, around 4 am, Marcella jabbed a deep-in-sleep me in the ribs, exclaiming, “look at this!” She was watching a film on her notebook, Penn’s Into the Wild. The occasion for pulling me out of my slumbers was to point at the name Alenka Pavlin floating by in the tail credits. Alenka and I lived together way back in 1985-7. She moved down to LA from San Francisco long ago, following her interests in sound recording. She was boom operator for Penn on this one, getting travels all over for 6 months. Lucky her.
Of course, like more or less all those who trundled stylishly dressed to the dais to receive their golden dildo, as well as those who sat splendorously to watch them, they all land somewhere on the upper levels of the income charts of the US, if not among the exclusive club of mostly financial-corporate CEO souls whose wealth is measured in mere billions. Hollywood stars are amply rewarded though, enough to push them to the top percentile or so in earnings. Meanwhile Joe Blow has seen this:
Or, as the recent unemployment figures underline, they are dropping precipitously far lower than this graph suggests. Of course this graph lies, like graphs often do, by failing to tell just what this ascending Gross Domestic Product was composed of – what was America busy making? As mentioned, we were cranking out food, and movies, and weapons, though not as this graph would suggest in such accelerating amounts. Nope. What we were busy manufacturing during these years, under the philosophical guidance of the Bush administration in which regulation, oversight, or just following-the-laws, were brushed aside in the interests of globalization and “the Free Market” and other such shibboleths, so that we could make “financial instruments” like derivatives and bundled debts and the entire Wall Street lexicon of fiscal mumbo-jumbo which has all proved to spell something like P-O-N-Z-I. Though on a scale which makes that name origin look like chump change. So in fact our “product” actually reflected not the top line on the above graph, but the bottom one: we were just chuggin’ along at make-do level. With one major problem – most were doing it just like the guys on the top were doing it, on imaginary money, running up credit card debt of one kind or another, charging it to their expanding home “value,” and other such bookkeeping sleights-of-hand. But now the piper is calling and everyone is showing empty pockets. And, as we are seeing, the Reaganite trickle-down is coming as an apocalyptic deluge, but in negatives: the Wall Street hot shots cut back on the $5 latte and there goes the local barrista to the unemployment line, along with the aspiring actor cum waiter, and the myriad other members of our supposedly new “service industry” economy. The fabulously wealthy scamsters of the corporate world are suddenly bust, and along with them goes all the “servicing,” classy call-girl blow-jobs and all. The spiral down is now an avalanche, as in the fabled (and false) explanation of how the World Trade Center fell – one floor pancaking to the next in a vertical domino effect, but here it’s fiscal entities heading at gravitational speed to terra firma.
For the record, again, I feel certain that 9/11 is so full of fishy aspects that it must have been some kind of inside job. The image of Mr Bush reading My Pet Goat (upsidedown – what an example to the kids…) smacks of a rich kid who just did something real nasty and just found out about it:
Mr Bush, who has seemingly vanished from the world, was quoted before he departed as pondering, in a kind of poor-little-me manner, “why did it (the economic melt-down) have to happen on my watch?” Indeed. It must not have had anything to do with his policies, enforcement of existing law, example of brazen law-breaking himself, or the rampant corruption at all levels which characterized his administration. Just a coincidence, of course.
So while the nation and the world took a deep breath of hopeful release as Obama took up the keys to the national vehicle, the clatter of ever-worse news has muffled the sighs of content. Certainly it appears that he’s a can-do kind of guy, and has surrounded himself with like-minded help, but one senses it all may be – despite the astounding numbers tossed about (700 billion here, 1.3 trillion there, 7 trillion cumulatively over there …. our eyes glaze over in incomprehension at these can’t-imagine digits) too little way too late. Nor can we, or those bandying them about, really gauge just what they might do aside from burning up the Treasury printing presses. As they themselves seem to say, they’re doing it because they have to, “to save the system.”
And indeed that seems to be the fundamental problem – an incapacity to let go of what is transparently a rotten system, in which these crises are cyclical and predictable, having to do with some of the basic rules of that system. Like its arch-rival, “communism” (whichever label one puts on it, in America anything that hints of some gentle mode of “socialism” is deemed irredeemable on utterance), capitalism comes out of the womb with a built in sure-fire Achille’s Heel. With communism the problem is actually the same as with capitalism, with just the shifting of a few words which have proven to be interchangeable. Capitalism posits that “the economic market” will sort out all values, deliver the most efficient delivery of things to ever happier souls, and make for a little paradise here on earth. It does this by economic competition, in which the strong/better etc. survive and are well-rewarded for their services to humanity. That this system seems to repeatedly result in skewed income charts, booms and busts, not to mention a broader rampage of damage on the environment, social relations, and the human psyche is thought to be irrelevant to those fundamentalists of the Market. As Mr Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush are inclined to respond to those who point out these problems – “So what?” Indeed. Communism makes similar promises, if only for a temporary time we place dictatorial power in well-intentioned hands for a short term in order to build a workers’ paradise on earth. We’ve seen what happened with that one in China, the old USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and elsewhere. Somehow the honey of this power attracts a certain kind of personality, and the shift to an anarchic non-government of happy collectives is ever delayed, while Mao orchestrates his Great Leaps and plays with his concubines, or Pol Pot plows his killing fields.
In both ideologies something is fundamentally amiss, something so obvious and self-evident that it is hard to think that grown-ups actually believe them. Especially since for the most part myths and fables and the collective wisdom of the ages all say pretty much the same thing and we’ve attempted (always failing) to build social restraints to minimize these things. Left to their own devices, humans are pretty selfish and greedy; surrounded with a system, like a capitalist one which celebrates wealth, and hence greed, a lot of people will not hesitate to trample over the next person to get whatever there is to be gotten first. Along the way they and their cohorts will of course construct a social and psychological framework to support this and all its consequent results. They will be celebrated, churches will bless them, and so on. Communism does the same thing, except shifts “power” into play instead of “wealth” (though in practice those in power in communist cultures were always the wealthiest as well, duh…). Boiled down to essences there are probably certain percentages of any populace of people who are either genetically and/or socially predisposed to seek and have power – for the psychological pleasure of it. In either capitalist or communist systems these people are funneled to their appropriate place on top of the heap, and they then indulge their inner selves to their needs. Hello Mr Stalin, Lenin, Mao, or though carrying a differing banner but espousing essentially the same things, hello Mr Schicklegruber, a.k.a. Hitler. And there are people who like to follow authoritarian leaders, so a perfect mix.
One would think with the plethora of example before us, we’d figure it out and see that the basic flaw in these “systems” is staring us in the mirror. All that capitalism and communism do, precisely because they are systems, is to amplify this human constant of greed and power-hunger.
So as this crisis hits the US, as well as the rest of the world, rather than, as Mr Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel suggests one should do and turn a crisis into a moment of opportunity, we find all the powers that be directed toward “saving the system.” They’ll modify this and that, make it environmentally a bit more sane, try to ameliorate the vast income disparities, trim back the military a touch, and basically do a lot of cosmetics aimed to resuscitate a failed system. We hear Obama assert in his Inaugural Address that “we will not apologize for our way of life” – without noting that “our way of life” is that 5% of the world’s population consumes 25% of its energy; that a tiny fraction of that 5% owns some obscene chunk of the world’s wealth, and so on. We don’t hear that were the entire globe to live in the manner Americans live (even those gliding along on that bottom line on the chart), we could kiss our asses communally good-bye in short order.
What we need to do, for ourselves, and for this little hospitable site we live on, is to question the entire system, question our entire set of values and priorities, and commence with some profound changes in how we all live. But it is a characteristic of systems like “capitalism” or “communism” that they cannot do such things as question themselves in such a manner. Just like religious fundamentalists cannot do so. Instead it seems, despite ample historical examples to give us cautionary lessons, we must drive ourselves over a cliff, into a real hard inescapable catastrophe before we are willing to adjust our behavior in any significant manner. At the moment we’re in the prelude, likely with a major depression building around us, with all its attendant probable social-political ramifications (wars, famines, the usual company of such tragedies), and rather than confront this impending matter, we prefer to make some minor adjustments hoping it will all just go away and allow us to resume a few years hence in a manner something just like we were doing.
In which case it is somewhat more likely we’ll be looking like the pair in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I recently finally finished reading. For the most part a compelling book though I felt it was a bit redundant (hard not to be when the world has been stripped down to almost nothing), and that the ending was a tad too upbeat. I’ll be curious to see how the film copes with it – almost guaranteed to be a big box office loser, especially in these depression bound times when most would prefer a frothy musical to lose a few hours in.
For me it’s back to classes this coming week. Two a week, one being the Visual Directing kind of foundation here’s-what-DV-can-be course, and the other this time around being make-a-feature-with-Jon. Meaning we have to crank out a new feature in the coming 4 months, using students as help, actors, sources for places, settings, ideas. I have not given it a thought, wanting to have it be generated from whatever we can piece together in the first few weeks. I’m completely open.
Meantime on our trip to Singapore-Malacca-Kuala Lumpur (see cinemaelectronica) some possible future options seem to open up – a perhaps teaching job in S’pore and maybe later on setting up a kind of school in Malaysia. We should know more of these soon. While on journey we got an urgent email from Yonsei, urging me to sign contract for the coming year. This was a bit uncharacteristic as last year they’d waited late in the game to indicate they’d be wanting me back. Word must have drifted.
Forty years ago I was in Chicago, working at “the Mobe” office, readying for the convention. My friend Kurt Heyl and I had already been arrested a week earlier, making some Bolex shots of the convention center, where in a piece of political hubris they’d decided to build a mini-White House portico at the entrance. In another week the chants of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win” or “Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids you kill today” would echo through the canyons of the Loop, and the acrid bite of tear gas would float in the hot summer air. Far away in Vietnam Americans were writing their names on a dark wall in Washington, and unnumbered Vietnamese were giving their bodies to the fetid tropical soil of their homeland in what they called “The American War.” Little did I imagine 4 decades hence I’d be in Hanoi, a near life-time later, trying in some tiny way to make amends for the horrors my country had visited upon Vietnam, as well as upon itself. Though something in me knew that most likely were I to live so long, America would be doing much the same these forty years later: today my country – with a long list of detours through Grenada, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Guatemala, Chile and other adventures – has occupied Iraq, a country of 23 million but astride a significant pool of oil, and has laid waste in the same heedless manner with which it mangled Vietnam. Then it was Agent Orange, body counts, the Phoenix Program and a litany of other Orwellian military acronyms which hid the ugly truth. Today, having learned their version of the lessons of Vietnam, the cluster of resentful neo-con souls who gather around Richard Cheney, and whose signatures can be found in the documents of The Project for the New American Century, deploy what they imagine to be a smarter variant of the same programs, thinking to impose a Pax Americana on the middle-east, though transparently eying the resources that lie just beneath the surface of the sand – a policy written in the blood of now a million dead Iraqis, 5000 and more Americans (the number obscured by the privatization of warfare executed by the Bush Market-Economy wizards), and running from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan to Venezuela – wherever the oil that is needed to power the American military juggernaut resides. And likewise the landscape is littered with the toxins of American warfare, in this instance the cancer of so-called depleted uranium, settling in for its half-life of a million years, whether in the GIs who dispensed the weapons, or the Iraqi and Afghani terrain which now hosts the residue. The bill is just beginning to come in.
Forty years ago, in a paroxysm of violence, America turned right, electing Richard Nixon, who with Henry Kissinger – still alive and still maneuvering in corpse-like fashion in the underworld of arms and real politick power, ever a fixture at the Bilderberg conferences – dragged out the Vietnam war a few million more deaths, only to leave in an indecent interval, helicopters clattering from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon as the VC rolled in. By then I was living a hardscrabble life in Montana and working on a film, SPEAKING DIRECTLY (1974-5), which sought in desperation to account for the maelstrom of America in the wake of the 60’s. It sought to explain in some manner the meaning of the sound “Vietnam” to one American, reflecting perhaps many others. Little did I imagine what would unfold in my life, or America’s, or the world in that time. Little did I imagine 4 decades hence I’d be doing a workshop in Hanoi for the Vietnam Film Department, trying to coax a little imagination and creativity from a dozen souls mired in a system in which rote learning is the norm, and exposure to the world is minimal.
August 27. Leaving Hanoi, we spent a few days in Hue, site of a military feint by the North Vietnamese Army back in January 1968, when they carried out an action to keep General Westmoreland distracted while the Tet offensive was prepared. It was one of the major battles of the war, and also site of what today might be called “ethnic cleansing” – the summary execution of governmental officials collaborating with the Americans. Today it is a languid provincial town, with a tourist strip, and the surrounding area offering a pock-marked landscape of bomb craters to remind of the war 40 years ago, with special DMZ tours.
And then we came to Saigon, now named Ho Chi Minh City. It’s a huge place, exploded from the one million of 1965 to eight million inhabitants (in part owing to the fleeing of rural peasants to Saigon during the war), a buzzing mix of tropic 3rd world impoverishment and hyper-capitalism, all cohabiting under the eyes of one of the few remaining Communist Party apparatuses of the world. Across the street from the Revolutionary Museum brand new stores dangle the baubles of Chanel and Gucci, underlining just who actually won the 20th century’s struggle between socialism and capital. Follow the money. Down the street near the Opera House – undergoing restoration – are the classier hotels. Not far away in the jammed streets of District 1, the signs of Sony and Nokia signal the marketplace of ideology in which I-pods and cell-phones have triumphed. The air chokes with the gas and oil fuel of a million motorbikes.
We visited the “War Remnants Museum” – a tawdry collection of American airplanes and tanks, pieces of weaponry from the gas-fed “seismic bomb” to an M-16. They all look terribly archaic and almost toy-like by contemporary standards. The museum, like Viet Nam, is poor – a new building of poorly done concrete, a yard cluttered with “the remnants,” and the staff loitering about in the yard. In one room is a photography exhibition of faded and yellowing images shot by the many journalist photographers who died in Indo-China. The images are searing ones of war and its collateral damage, made more poignant by the fact that the photographers all died in process of providing this witness. Back in the 1960’s and ’70’s these images were widely accessible, to be found in magazines like Life (now defunct), or each night on “the news” (also defunct). Looking at them I was psychologically telescoped to my youth – reminded of the tension and stress of the period, of the passionate response of some Americans to the war in Viet Nam. I was, of course, reminded of my 2 plus years in prison, 1965-67. When I arranged to come to Viet Nam, I had anticipated some kind of psychological upheaval, which I thought surely was one of the reasons for coming – it was something I wanted to touch, to confront in myself, in the raw reality of the place which had had so much impact in my life, as well as many others. In Hanoi and Hue there had only been a little ripple, a vague cloud of guilt, of the inadequacy of my long ago resistance – after all the war had ground on many more years and millions of deaths more. The transparent poverty and relative technological primitiveness of Viet Nam was made utterly clear, making all the more obscene my country’s arrogant behavior, one reflected in the present election where John McCain waves his bloodied flag and his POW status as a defense for all his actions, and it is somehow ignored that what he was doing was participating in a mechanized mass murder imposed on civilians, a vast pillage of a poor underdeveloped country which failed to submit to the imperial wishes of Washington. Adding to the painfulness was the simple fact that some 40 plus years later, my country is doing the same thing once again, now in Iraq. It attacked an embargo-debilitated country of 23 million, half children, waged a high-tech war of alleged “Shock and Awe,” displacing 3 or 4 million from their homes, ravaging the economy and infrastructure, and killed directly or indirectly one million, most of whom were civilians. But this time the images have been suppressed by a corporate media which is in the pocket of the government, or, in Mussolini’s terms, who are part of the fascist structure – the government and the corporations are the same thing, which in the US today is simply the truth, and the mass media are part and parcel of corporate conglomerates which dictate American governmental policy, and hence what “news” is to be. And this time in a clear effort to minimize political risks, the military is kept separate from the body politic, privatized, and there is no selective service. The young can be enraptured by American Idol and the myriad other corporate entertainments and enticements, seduced into a consumer landscape in which personal responsibility is reduced to the obligation to buy, be fashionable, and go into credit-card debt (forever). Iraq? Who cares. All of these are clearly deliberate policies developed over the decades since the 1960’s, policies intended to permit the government to do whatever it wishes, unfettered by any public revulsion or political discord. In the 1960’s there were massive demonstrations; today there are “free speech zones” to provide a fig-leaf of pretend “liberty” in the land of the allegedly brave and the free.
And so in this visit, the anticipated psychological impact arrived in full, mostly courtesy of the faded images of Robert Capa, Dana Stone, Kyoichi Sawada, and the other 130 war reporters killed during the war. Though it had already arrived in the numerous young people in Hue and HCM City, victims now 3 generations later of the use of Agent Orange, cruelly deformed and reduced to begging. Or in the chatter of an alleged former RVN soldier who walked with us on the street, who begs as well, pulling out an English language letter encased in plastic, hand-printed, detailing his past, his visit to America, and a litany of woe, which if true would tally with the treatment which RVN soldiers – collaborators with America – did in fact receive. Or in the irony which seems to pervade the streets of HCM City, where American capitalist triumphalism seems to have won out – if badly timed in light of America’s own collapse, thanks to its run-of-the-mill imperial life-cycle behavior: over-extended, fat, lazy, and sucking its own life and soul out in excessive and mindless military expenditures. On one building a large sign illuminates the phrase “PERFECT USA.” Well, not quite. Instead America is rotted on the inside, corrupted (and not just the government, but across the board), and intellectually and morally rudderless and at sea. The current election offers a quiver of hope, but it is probably far too little far too late.
In the photo exhibit there was a text in which the death of Robert Capa, covering the Indo-China war, in which a Vietnamese doctor inquired if Capa was American. Told yes, he commented, “This is a harsh way for America to learn.” That was in 1952, while the French were (not) holding down the fort. Now almost 70 years later, it seems America has not yet learned.
WTC steel elements for sale
Walden Pond
George Catlin, Buffalo Hunt
Aurora Borealis, Duluth, Minn.
Jack Kerouac keeping score
Warren Buffett in a bad year, takes a big loss in Omaha
So did Columbus, Nebraska
G7 meets in Pittsburgh
Galveston, Oct 2008
Detroit
Hummer in Afghanistan
Protesting Obama school talk
