"Don't Forget the Flaming Arrows!"

You kids will probably be seeing a lot more of your old man around the house now that the Screengrab, A.K.A. my steady job for the past two years, is no fucking more. I had a good time there this past week, writing about a few things that it suddenly seemed worth writing about before it was too late--Joe Don Baker, The Outside Man, Amy Madigan, Million Dollar Legs, plus this guy who ate this other guy after trying unsuccessfully to bite off his dick--but I was surprised at how depressed I suddenly felt when I put up my last item. Maybe the surprise is that I sense that the money isn't the worst part of it. I hadn't realized how nice it was to be a part of something. Thanks to the wonders of electronic self-publishing, I can of course continue to write sometimes maddeningly contrary stuff about movies that nobody cares about to my heart's content, but now I'm back to being strictly a solo act.

Losing your job is one way to get depressed. Another way might be to look at some of the movies that you were able to project yourself into as a child and get a fresh new perspective on just what a stupid little prat you were. A week or so ago, I happened to notice that TCM was showing Harry in Your Pocket a 1973 movie starring James Coburn as the leader of a team of professional pickpockets. It turns out that it's the only feature film feature directed by Mission: Impossible creator Bruce Geller; he also produced it and wrote the lyrics of the theme song, one of those tender, time-is-the-cruelest-thief "Try to Remember" rip-off dealies that always used to make my skin crawl when I was a kid and that now make my skin crawl for entirely different reasons now that I'm old enough to understand the sentiment. It's a cheesy, sleazy movie that I remember seeing on TV a couple of times when I was a kid, and liking, probably because, like a lot of movies that I found fascinating as a pre-teen, I mistook it for a possible game plan for adult life: you finished school, got the hell out of Mississippi, and then wandered around this great country of ours, taking in the sights and swinging by the airport or the town square whenever you needed to lift a little walking-around money from someone else's wallet. Sobering, really. The cast also includes Walter Pidgeon, who, in his only attempt to portray an aging coke fiend, gets to deliver one of those speeches about how being a professional criminal used to be an honorable craft requiring principles and a hard-earned set of skills before the punks moved in and everything went to hell; Trish Van Devere, who's supposed to be a vulnerable young chippie with a hard shell and who gives her usual impersonation of a spinster headmistress at a reputable girls' school who summons Groundskeeper Willie to her quarters every night and breaks out the nipple clips and cat-o'-nine-tails; and Michael Sarrazin. The movie was actually being broadcast as part of TCM's evening-long salute to Michael Sarrazin. I hadn't thought about Michael Sarrazin in the longest time, and might never have done so again if it hadn't been for TCM. Their selection pretty well established that Michael Sarrazin was not one of the movies' great underutilized talents.




After Harry in Your Pocket, TCM ran The Pursuit of Happiness, a 1971 youth picture that did not figure prominently in the obituaries of its director, Robert Mulligan. I'd never heard of it myself, and everybody knows what a hound I am for early-'70s youth pictures. This one opens with a Randy Newman song that he didn't bother putting on an album until the box set Guilty, close to three decades later. It's actually a good way to start a picture like this, because it seems to express a self-generated, self-pitying kind of adolescent misery, not unsympathetically but not unsardonically, either. ("Just let my heart go on beating a little bit longer," Newman moans, sounding not a day over seventy. "I'm so young, I;m so young.") Then Sarrazin, who's been playing with his toy boat in the park, goes home to his college-student bachelor pad apartment. Here's how you know that Sarrazin is a nonconformist free spirit: he's in his apartment when his aunt, Sada Thompson, barges in and starts Lovey Howelling it up, until Barbara Hershey, wearing a towel and with her hair wet from the shower, comes out of the bathroom. Aunt Sada is all, Oooooh, is that the time, nevah mind the tea, Michael, I must be going, whoowhoowhoowhoo! Then Sarrazin scoops Hershey up in his arms and drops her on the bed and grabs her and rolls around on the bed with them, both of them laughing and laughing and laughing, while Hershey is careful to use hand to make sure that towel stays in place the whole time. As much as they enjoy doing this, imagine what it'll be like when they find out how you make babies.

The movie itself is both lame and insane, a real winning combination. Its main source of interest is that its madness seems to be a product of confused people trying to say something about the particular confusions of their time. Sarrazin is apolitical, a nice guy, well-groomed, pleasant, handsome in a clean-cut blue-eyed male angel way, and on top of it all, he's from money, with a respectable conservative family with immaculate connections. Yet everybody who looks at him seems to see a wild hippie malcontent, and this doesn't seem meant as a joke. When he gets in trouble, it's for something that ought to get you into trouble: driving his puke-green car around on a rainy night, he runs into an old lady and kills her. Then the judge (Bernard Hughes) gets the idea that he doesn't have a lot of respect for the law, because he's been driving around with 22 unpaid parking tickets, which sounds like a reasonable supposition on the judge's part to me. But you're supposed to get the feeling that he's being railroaded, because E. G. Marshall, as the uncle who arranges his legal defense, sneers at him for having come to a "Republican lawyer...reactionary bastard" and cautions him that being on trial isn't like having "fun and games at that hotbed of communism you call a university," and orders him to wear a suit in court.

Sentenced to a year in the jug for criminal negligence, Sarrazin befriends a black prisoner who asks him for help in wording a love letter to another prisoner. When his new friend is knifed in the shower by a romantic rival, Marshall gets another chance to sneer at Sarrazin, this time for being the only witness to the killing to be so "noble" as to offer to testify at the killer's trial. Somehow, Sarrazin's time in the witness box turns into a jousting match between him and the defense attorney, who tries to insinuate that there might have been something going on between him and the dead man, because why else would he have been helping him work on his love letters to men? Asked what the dead man ever did for him, Sarrazin says, with a straight face, "He taught me how to shovel coal. Does that make me a queer?" (Somewhere, Tobias Fünke is smiling.) The whole thing goes so badly that the judge seems to threaten Sarrazin with extending his sentence, so Sarrazin excuses himself to go to the little boys' room and escapes through a handy open window.

The movie ends with Sarrazin and Hershey fleeing the country, lighting out for Canada in a small plane that pointedly soars past the Statue of Liberty on it way to true freedom. Mulligan and company appear to have mixed together half a dozen different paranoid concerns, including some that don't really go together, such as the Establishment's crushing rebellious youth and the plight of the poor little rich kid at the mercy of the envious working class bullies, along with a veiled plea for sympathy for those young Americans jumping the border to Canada to evade that part of the national nervous breakdown that had spilled over into Vietnam. Sarrazin finally convinces his girl of the wisdom of getting the hell out of the country by saying that it's not just that he doesn't want to go back to prison, but that "there's a nervous breakdown going on out there, and I don't want to be a part of it." It's weird now to see a movie from a time when rational people were prepared to make a case for just washing their hands of what a mess America had become and even try to make a movie hero of someone who'd rather just run away from it all. Bad as Rush Limbaugh is, even when he seemed all-powerful, he mostly just made people want to stay here and fight him.



Thanks to TCM, I also recently saw my first Jungle Jim pictures. These films, which were based on an Alex Raymond comic strip that I'd actually love to see some time, were what Johnny Weissmuller did with himself after his run as Tarzan petered out. He plays a great white hunter type hanging out in the African jungle, waiting for some white people to blunder through the brush, needing his help. Basically, he's still Tarzan, except that he gets to wear clothes and speak full sentences, though he's only adept at one of these innovations. He even still has a chimpanzee sidekick, who for all I know is played by one of the Cheetas. (And after the Jungle Jim series ran into legal problems regarding the rights to the character, he made another string of jungle pictures in which he still did the same basic act, except now, his character was named Johnny Weissmuller.) I was actually impressed with Johnny's physique in the films I saw. I don't guess there's any arguing that he'd lost the steamy animal quality he had as Tarzan, but based on all the descriptions I'd read of Johnny as lost and hopelessly debauched in his post-Tarzan period, I was sort of expecting a bloated, prematurely aged lump with a swollen belly and a triple chin, staggering through the jungle grunting out his lines between belches. For an ex-swimmer in his forties in the pre-Bowflex era, he doesn't look that bad.

The movies themselves look like shit, I'm afraid. The quality of the jungle itself is less back lot than back yard, and the failure to match the principal photography with the stock footage of animals that's joined to it borders on a Brechtian device. In one scene, Johnny dives underwater to perform some heroics that are intercut with footage of a shark battling a squid, presumably because Johnny's heroics were deemed insufficiently exciting on their own. Then Johnny swims to the surface, stopping along the way to knife the shark, which, considering that they're barely in the same movie, takes some doing. Maybe that squid was an old college friend.) Apparently Jungle Jim was the Scooby Doo of his day, helping ignorant natives in flower-print sarongs who were being harassed by such nasties as the "skeleton warriors"--three guys in Halloween costumes who upset the natives so badly that they're all but defenseless when their backup arrives and attack the camps. It all turns out to be part of a scheme by Ed Wood regular Lyle Talbot to maintain an assembly line of slaves to mine his beloved Igneous rock. Talbot, whose delivery here rivals Max Showalter's for superciliousness, tells the heroine, "You're a very attractive girl. If I were you, I shouldn't exchange the glow of beauty for the glow of radioactivity." (The heroine, a sassy girl reporter who's come looking for a millionaire's missing son, has earlier addressed the Cheeta stand-in as, "You first cousin to a baboon!", which as wisecracking insults go would be pretty fair if she weren't, you know, talking to a monkey.) In the end, Talbot goes over a cliff, the girl reporter embraces and kisses the millionaire's missing son, and the chimp leaps into Johnny's arms and extends its own smoochable lips. Johnny's attempt to appear amused by this while some no-name young bit player is getting all the tail is his manliest act of heroism in the film.

This'll Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You

Joel Surnow, the co-creator (with Robert Cochran) of the TV series 24, enjoys twitting the "liberal" media by advertising his "isolationist"-conservative politics, and the amusement he gets from the way that the show's hero, the government super-agent and wind-up action toy Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) has been taken up as the right wing's favorite fictional argument for the efficacy of torture. At the same time, 24--which, like all long-running TV series, is of course a collaborative effort that draws on the talents of scores of people who are all over the map in terms of their political beliefs, so that this past season included prominent acting roles for both the deranged rightie Jon Voight and the shrill leftie Janeane Garofalo, both of them playing cartoon versions of their public images--works hard to signal to the audience that it has something for everyone. The series has patriotic white-bread American heroes who run around bashing and torturing Arab and Latin terrorists who, more often than not, turn out to be in league with pasty, rich old white guys who work in high levels of the government or military; the heroes do this work on behalf of black and woman presidents.

Like The West Wing before it, the show is a fantasy that has to maintain a careful balance in regard to its relation to the real world, and this past season began with Jack being forced to defend his methods to a Congressional committee; he would, of course, spend the rest of the season demonstrating the necessity of those methods. You could say that, given to what's happened on the show since it premiered in the fall of 2001, the changes in the real world in the last several months dictated that Jack's identity as a torturer be dealt with. But there's one aspect of the show that has become more and more pronounced over its run, an aspect that really does define it as a conservative show. It's the fact that Jack suffers so much from what he's done, even as he knows that he had to do it. He suffers even though, as he has affirmed in a scene that seems to have been replayed over and over between him and one questioner or another, he has "no regrets."

Again and again, Jack finds himself in control of people who, he knows, have one piece of information that could save thousands of lives. They do not want to give it to him. He persuades them to do so by whaling on them. A master of torture psychology, he generally knows the one way to get them to talk; a few seasons back, when Jack was in the home of an old friend turned villain and had a gun on him, and knew that nothing he did to the guy would make him talk, Jack shot the guy's wife. But still--no regrets. He only does what has to be done. In return for this, Jack is badgered, insulted, thought ill of, pulled in front of investigators and called a monster on national TV. For seven seasons now, Jack has been relentlessly gruff and humorless, and you could infer that this is because of the weight he carries, which just in the first season cost him his wife, who was murdered by his former lover, who turned out to be a super-villain, and left him with the sad realization that his beloved daughter Kim is an idiot and, in terms of her contribution to the show, an anchor. But the show itself feels so sorry for Jack that it just seems logical to assume that one reason he's so down at the mouth is that he feels sorry for himself.

This mixture of lawlessness and self-pity is what links Jack to the current fashion in conservative heroes, going back at least to Oliver North, sitting before the Senators with his sad-cow eyes and his lower lip flapping in the breeze, explaining that he had broken the law because he so loved his country that he had to go beyond the bounds of law to keep us safe, and then asserting that the Senators had no right to punish him because his heart was pure. There's the twist that made him so much a part of Republican morality as it's been defined since Reagan, and that marked a change from real-life heroes (such as Martin Luther King and Nathan Hale) and even fictional outlaw heroes such as Robin Hood, who were prepared to accept responsibility for their actions, including laws they broke that they thought were unjust. The style caught on, though not everyone can bring it off. Scooter Libby was too slappable to master it, and while Dick Cheney has the self-righteousness down, he's too Blofeld-like to credibly convey self-pity. But Jack is the modern master of it.

Sutherland's performance, which has thoroughly redefined his image and career, shows just how irresistible the self-pitying enforcer act can seem when it's done to a crisp. In his first several years in movies, Sutherland was a weird-looking Brat Pack also-ran; as his youth started to slip away, his most striking roles, as a big bad wolf of a serial killer in Freeway and as the exposition merchant in the sci-fi fantasy Dark City, made it look as if he might be turning into the new Dwight Frye. His transformation into a TV action hero seemed a mighty unlikely development, but as soon as he turned into Jack Bauer, he developed a new, flinty authority that he'd never shown before. The few movies he's appeared in since 24 launched were in and out of theaters pretty quickly, and probably it helped that, as a TV star, he suddenly had smaller screens to fill, but it's possible to fail even at that: compare him to Christian Slater in My Own Worst Enemy if you want to know how thoroughly it's possible to belly flop in both media.

Jack is no anarchist. In the season finale yesterday night, he had a little speech, explaining to the redheaded FBI agent who had followed him throughout his latest adventure that he knows the laws are important, and other people have to obey them. Maybe if he were a stronger man, he could obey them himself. But, Jack said, when he could torture someone and get the information he needs to save some people on the bus, he knows that the law is more important, in theory, than the lives of those people, but in actuality, he just can't help himself. He goes soft. He wants to save the people. This is that "empathy" stuff that conservatives are so horrified by when they hear that Obama would like to see it in a Supreme Court justice. Empathy is tantamount to fascism when it affects your decision over whether a minimum wage worker has any business suing her employer for unlawful termination. It's okay, though, when it gives you a reason to pistol whip somebody. At times, Jack's speeches about how hard it is to do what he does, and his constant reminders that he is almost unique in his ability to do it wisely and effectively, remind me of the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. That was the one where Harry, having acted above the law in the first movie, encountered a bunch of vigilante cops who acted above the law. Harry made a speech explaining why this was wrong of them--"I hate the goddamn system," he snarled, but it was necessary so that people who didn't have his powers of omniscience didn't run amok. Then, of course, he faced off against the vigilantes and blew them all to bits. At the end of Keifer's speech, the redhead, who started out frowning on his extreme tactics, is ready to march into the interrogation room and torture the head baddie. Compared to a Dirty Harry movie, 24 wants to be seen as "realistic", so Jack needs help sometimes.

When 24 premiered, the big question that people had about it was technical: could the producers really pull off a 24-episode adventure serial, one plot unspooling out across the season and holding the viewers' attention, and then if it did work, could they do it again next season? As those of us who've been following it since the beginning can tell you, they had some choppy waters for a while, but they basically pulled it off the first season, and practice has only made them better at it: in terms of sustained excitement, the show has only gotten better these last couple of seasons. I used to wonder why, even as I kept tuning in week after week, I wasn't more grateful for this achievement than I have been, and it took me a while to realize something very basic. That is that, while 24 hs become ever more reliably attention-holding and "riveting" and all that, it's never really been much fun, and it's only gotten less and less fun the more that Jack, to justify his working methods and maintain his status as a sympathetic character, has gotten more and more pouty. I don't think this has as much to do with an aversion to the show's "politics" as it does to the show's mysterious devotion to "realism." It's a peculiar kind of realism: the show can't help being implausible, but it tries to skirt gaudiness--I imagine that the scene from the pilot where a hot, evil babe fucks a guy on a commercial airliner and parachutes out after planting a bomb aboard, all apparently just so she can steal the poor dude's wallet, would not make it out of story conference these days.

Given what kind of show 24 is, you'd think that being fun would be its first priority, and maybe it's last priority and all the ones in between. But the show is pretty much devoid of humor and playfulness and sexiness and romance; it proceeds from adrenaline jolt to adrenaline jolt, with little breaks for Jack to suffer so we'll appreciate him. If 24 were able to catch the feel of a good James Bond movie and keep it rolling for six months, then it would truly be a wonder, but instead it's pitched to that segment of the TV audience that would rather have its cheap thrills spiked with solemnity than with devil-may-care cleverness. James Bond never much minded having to beat the shit out of people; he was the unapologetic representative of that part of the viewer who suspected that, under the right circumstances, he might rather enjoy that part of the job of keeping the world safe. That's what James Bond is as timeless as Jack Bauer is a creation of his times.

Words, Words, Words

The first time I ever heard about a contemporary plagiarism case was in 1980, when Walter Clemons of Newsweek used a book review to bust some author whose big new novel turned out to be sewn together with strips torn from the hide of W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil. That same year, Jacob Epstein was obliged to admit that his debut novel, Wild Oats, has been ripped off from Martin Amis's debut, The Rachel Papers. What I remember most strongly about these incidents was an Eliot Fremont-Smith column that appeared in the Village Voice at the time, and what I remember about that column was its regretful, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. As I remember it, Fremont-Smith just seemed to think that it was so, so sad that these writers had been caught, and he even wrote that, of course, nobody wants to be the one who accuses a writer of plagiarism. I found this attitude shocking at the time, but since then I've come to see that it does reflect the prevailing attitude towards word theft in publishing and academia. And though a beginner like Epstein (who went on to be a successful TV producer-writer) can have his literary career stopped in its tracks by this kind of thing, an established writer, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose, usually walks away from even a well-documented plagiarism charge with the barest scratch on his dignity.

I think this is wrong, because I do think that plagiarism is stealing, but I think I understand the attitude a lot better now than when I was in junior high. (Having held a job that depends on linking to news sites and trying to find a way to describe what's there in words just different enough from those found in the original story to count as my own has been a big help in this department.) People who generate lots of copy feel their brains streamlining in a way so that they can keep the flow of words coming, and sometimes they tap into pockets that didn't originate in their own brains. So little turns of phrase pop up that you may not immediately recognize having heard before, especially with deadline looming. A jury concluded that George Harrison had "subliminally" nicked the melody of "He's So Fine", maybe because the thought that he had knowingly turned that particular phrase into a song of tribute to "My Sweet Lord" was just too grotesque a possibility to consider. About a year before I read those articles in Newsweek and the Voice, I myself wrote a detective novel--it was not good--and I remember how proud I was of the name I'd invented for my private eye hero: Hunter Thompson. In the course of my adventures plowing the slush pile at a small literary agency, one of the first things I ever read was a period detective novel that had a slinky femme fatale named Ginger Baker. It's still a bit much to expect anyone to believe that you could unknowingly duplicate entire paragraphs, word for word or close to it, from unconscious memory without realizing what you're doing. But when plagiarists claim that's what happened, it strikes enough of a nerve in a lot of professional writers to make them think, there but for the grace of God... And plagiarists always, with varying degrees of affronted belligerence, insist that that's exactly what must have happened.

Slate, which of all mainstream media outlets has perhaps the best record of demanding that plagiarism be treated as a serious ethical lapse and grounds for a proper public shaming, argues that Maureen Dowd, who stands accused of having filched from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, has handled the situation fairly admirably. Of course, as Slate's own work in this area has established, the bar is set pretty low. As Slate sees it, Dowd deserves points just for readily admitting that the words she stole did not originate with her: she copied them directly from a friend who, in conversation, turned out to be quoting Marshall word for word? Whether you buy this or not, compared to a Goodwin or a Mike Barnacle, it's a start, right?

I'm not so sure. I can't shake the feeling there's a kind of low cunning in Dowd's explanation, and that it's of a kind that sums up what has come to seem so infuriating about The New York Times as an institution and a mindset. Isn't the implication of Dowd's explanation that welding Marshall's writing into her column was on the level of copying down something that someone told her in conversation--which is what she says she thought she was doing, never suspecting that the sentences she was reproducing could be somebody's writing. Because that's what writing on the web, at a blog site, is: it's just somebody gassing on, it's not as if it's real writing. This is a fusion of the philistine idiocy that doesn't think plagiarism can amount to stealing because writing can't really be work, and old-media snobbery, and it's a corner that has always paid off for Dowd in the past: her specialty in her early years as a columnist was caricaturing Bill Clinton as glorified trailer trash, and before the conventional wisdom turned on George W. Bush, she led the pack in arguing that his knuckle-dragging tendencies made him a welcome antidote to the "unmanly" Al Gore. In her explanation, she repeatedly refers to Marshall as "Josh", which in context seems more passive-aggressive than chummy to me. For all I know, Dowd and Marshall are dear pals who TM each other mercilessly and have sleepovers whenever their moms are out of town--though that's not the impression one gets from reading the posts about the plagiarism at TPM--but on this occasion, one would expect that Dowd would go out of her way to make a public show of respect for the man she stole from, even if she did it inadvertently. Instead, this first-name thing seems like an attempt to undercut him, to assure her Times masters that this little blogging insect is no one to be concerned about. I have no idea whether Dowd herself thinks that bloggers are unworthy of her notice, but I'll bet her editors at the Times do, and I'll bet that Dowd knows that.

More than Jayson Blair or Jeff Gerth or Rick Bass, maybe even more than Judith Miller, at whose expense she had so much fun when the coast was clear, Dowd's career handily sums up the Times' self-destructive tendencies. Fifteen, twenty years ago, she was a good reporter, one who brought a fresh eye and some wit to the often meaningless Washington press corps events she had to cover. Ideally, she would have set the line of high-end competence that no national correspondent should be expected to slip behind, but instead, she was promoted to the op-ed page, on the theory that anyone whose writing had any personality at all must be too good to be a mere reporter. (Does this mean that the Times, the nation's newspaper, somehow doesn't care about reporting? If it did, could Gerth and Miller have ever thrived there?) Relieved of the responsibility to ever know what she's talking about, she's become a sketch artist of the conventional wisdom, the commentator as casting director, someone whose politics all come down to personality: Bill Clinton = Jeeter Lester; Al Gore = Felix Unger; George W. Bush = Tom Terrific until his poll numbers drop, at which point he suddenly morphs into Richie Rich with a lobotomy. It's all harmless enough, I guess, until you remember that this is the same editorial page that once housed Russell Baker, at which point you might just want to shudder a little. Not that the Times will ever have a problem with her, any more than it'll doubt that she's done Josh Marshall a favor by smuggling his grubby little Internet chatter into their handsome grey pages. Marshall cares about writing and politics, but Dowd knows where the buttons to press are located in the head office.

All I Can Say Is, "Ouch!"

I'm not sure what it says that, six months after an election that established that a significant majority of the electorate thinks we have serious problems that needed to be handed off to a new group of leaders with a different mindset and skills set, the big issue that keeps bubbling to the surface has to do with whether the people who ran this country for the first eight years of the new century happen to be war criminals. On the one hand, it might be seen as a hopeful sign that the media overlords who, not so long ago, were insisting that the country would have a nervous breakdown unless a winner was named in the 2000 election, pronto, and who even more recently eulogized Gerald Ford as a great patriot because he nipped the Watergate prosecution system in the bud, have been proven wrong in their theory that the people have no appetite for discussing whether some effort to call to account those who sanctioned torture is necessary for the country's moral health. On the other hand, it's pretty unsettling that it's the torturers themselves who want to keep the issue alive, not those who might be in a position to hold them accountable (and who, not altogether unreasonably, would rather not spend the next four years talking about the previous eight). It just shows you what we all know: if there's a cult of Dick Cheney, then it's based on the notion that the world's foremost mean old man has no interest whatsoever in what others think of him, and that this is an admirable quality even when it's taken to the point of nihilism. It's this same quality that drives us haters so crazy: unlike Nixon, Cheney not only has no conscience to nag at him but no feelings to be hurt. Or at least that's what we all thought, but watching him out there raging on the heath, it's shocking to see how much he does care, and how much he wants his name to be not just vindicated but celebrated. He wants the schoolchildren of America to be told about the brave old man who, by his willingness to tell others to get medieval on the asses of some insignificant dusky types, saved us from having more than one unprecedented terrorist attack on native soil during his watch. It's kind of touching if you think about, it without thinking too hard.

Cheney deserves some kind of balls award for the fact that, while he might prefer to wear out his tongue with the extra syllables needed to say "advanced interrogation techniques", you sense that he'd just as soon just concede that he's all for torture, pronounced "torture", so long as the rest of the world will concede that torture is effective in keeping us safe in a way that non-barbarism never can be. Given what's known about the limits of Cheney's moral imagination, I don't think there's any reason to doubt that he believes this. What's creepy about him is that, far from having arrived at this viewpoint after a long struggle, I also don't think there's any reason to doubt that he wants to believe this. It suits the emotional needs of a man who spent his political career mastering gutter ball, and who isn't in the market for an argument that it's possible to be successful in life without being knee deep in sewage. If there's a key difference between Cheney and George W. Bush, it may be Bush is human enough to want people to think that he's a concerned human being who doesn't take the lives of strangers so lightly that he would just blunder into a war of choice with whoever happens to be the national boogeyman, even if an actual threat to the country has sprouted up someplace else, just so he can scratch an Oedipal itch and call himself "a war president" with the same regularity that a dentist says, "Spit, please."

It ought to be possible to say, even though Cheney is incapable of seeing things this way, that torture is on that short list of things that are unacceptable even if they work, and leave it at that. In fact, it's not only possible to say this; it's incumbent upon us to say it, if we want to be able to boast of being a civilized people. At the same time, given the facts, how the hell can anyone leave it at that? Given what Cheney has to know about the circumstances under which his "advanced interrogation techniques" were carried out, how can he keep a straight face while trying to sell the notion that what was done amounted to a desperate attempt to keep our country safe? At Abu Ghraib, Iranians who were pulled off the street for the crime of looking suspiciously Iranian were pulled off the streets to meet a quota, locked up, thrashed and abused and generally fucked with, and not all of them left the place alive. Meanwhile, at Gitmo, actual terrorists and luckless innocents swept up in the net alike were tortured in order to get them to provide information about the nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that was so important to Cheney and Bush's desire to have a connection between the actual security needs of the country and the war that they really wanted in the depths of their cobweb-strewn hearts.

The disconnect between this reality and what Cheney and the Fox News zoo crew seem to think is going on now--i.e., a chorus of liberals calling for the execution of Jack Bauer for having saved a thousand schoolchildren from being blown up by kicking Cobra Commander in the shins--is great enough to tell us that the mythology that the right wing is preparing to erect about the Bush years will have very little connection to any actual events. As soon as the twin towers fell, the national conversation shifted into line with the mindset that there are these big, strong, remorseless daddy figures called Republicans, and that while there may be room for tolerance of other kinds of politicians and thinkers when times are soft, when things are scary, it's time to just recognize that only the Republicans can keep us safe with their manly gruffness and unthinking rectitude. Support for automatic acceptance of this idea started thinning out as soon as it became clear that the Iraq War was going to last longer than a few commercial breaks, but Fox News and the right think tanks will do their best in the coming years to insist that the Bush II years somehow prove the case, just as they now insist that Ronald Reagan's smiling handshakes with Gorbachev, which had right-wingers tearing their hair out at the time, somehow proved that the Soviet Union was an omnipotent monster that could only be destroyed by the Gipper's judicious use of the iron fist. In the "inspired by true events" version of the end of the Cold War, he karate chopped the Commies into submission while the liberals stood off to the side wringing their hands and whining, "Can't we just talk to them?"

Of course, when most people who were in the Bush White House talk about torture, they're content to say that it's horrible and that we didn't do it. Assuming that these people have any sense of humanity at all, the most likely interpretation of this is that they mean that, while water boarding people or slamming them into walls is, of course, "torture", torture is something that only bad people do, so when they did it, it couldn't be torture. The logic is in no meaningful sense different than that we saw during Impeachment Year 1998, when Republican Congressman after Republican Congressman, when confronted with evidence of their own indiscretions in between trips to the microphone to call for Bill Clinton to be hanged by his thumbs, indignantly explained that while affairs are unforgivable, what they had enjoyed was "a youthful indiscretion", even if, as was the case with Newt Gingrich, he was, by the grace of God and Viagra, having his most recent youthful indiscretion right at that moment in history.

The comparison is not made lightly. A few weeks ago, a New Yorker editorial made the point that Congressional Republicans, who couldn't shut up about their devotion to "the rule of law" when searching for reasons to impeach Clinton over lying under oath about a blow job, now can't see why the rule of law regarding torture is reason enough to hold anyone responsible for anything. What The New Yorker, in its literate politeness, failed to stress is how exactly comparable the two situations really are. How different, really, is the mindset of a man who, in a moment of lonely stress and weakness, decides that a dalliance with an adoring, and adorable, young woman is worth the risk of damaging his presidency, and the mindset of a great many people who, in the wake of a violent, despicable attack that has left them terrified and badly shaken, decide that the basic tenets of civilization just aren't strong enough to protect their country--or, to put it in a blunter way, that suddenly their desire to uphold the best instincts and standards upon which their country was founded is not as strong as their desire to grab somebody and slap the shit out of him, while telling themselves that this is somehow beneficial to national security. I would argue that the two impulses are very close to one another, partly, but not entirely, because both completely bypass the logic center of the brain. (And Condie Rice's insistence that torture isn't "torture" is a fair match for Clitnon's seemingly heartfelt belief that fellatio doesn't constitute "sexual relations.")

I know this comparison is designed to irritate members of the anti-adultery, pro-"expanded interrogation techniques" party, who are sure to bluster that adultery is sordid and vile on every level, whereas torture in the name of national security may be motivated by an excess of patriotic fervor, if such a thing can ever be excessive. I am not convinced, and am in fact kind of repulsed by any argument that suggests that anything that amounts to sadism can ever be more admirable than an act that, however much it constitutes an act of betrayal, does have some love in it. (I could go on and on in this vein, but I assume you didn't come here to see me do my best imitation of George Carlin circa 1972.) If the sorta-pro-torture argument is going to go on for quite a while longer, it won't be because there's a case to be made that torture was necessary or did more good than harm (or did anything close to as much good as harm), and it certainly won't be because any English-speaking person hasn't had his fill of Dick Cheney. It'll be because, as Michael Kinsley has pointed out, the responsibility for what went on during the Bush administration has to be shared by the country has a whole, especially by those who voted for Bush in 2004, and very especially by those in the media who found reason to salute Bush and Cheney in the early days, months, years, of their "war on terror" and to express gratitude that the country was in the hands of guys whose simple-minded goonishness passed for rugged toughness.

That's why torture is an issue that can't just be brushed aside by people like Thomas F. Friedman, who before the 2000 election told Charlie Rose, without naming names but making it clear what he was getting at, said with regard to the upcoming election that this was "not a time for a dummy", but who after 9/11 signed on whole-heartedly with the Bush/neo-con plan to "democratize" the Midwest through military invasion, finally writing, approvingly, that the "‘real reason’ for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world." Just as it was important six to eight years ago for these pundits to feel strong and protected because they thought their country was throwing its weight around and scaring the bad guys, it's important for them, now, to come to a general agreement that it was okay for this to happen so they have no reason to feel bad about it now, even though they can now see that it didn't help the situation much. They want to guide the conventional wisdom towards a decision that "everybody" thought it was necessary at the time, just as there's already a decision that "everybody" thought that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. It's not true that everybody thought it was necessary, any more than it's true that everybody thought that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but when the media was pitching in with the buildup to the war, part of their job was to paint anybody who spoke up against that idea as beyond the pale, which is how Scott Ritter, say, went from being someone who knew something about weapons inspections into a pedophile on Saddam's payroll. Enough people in the media who are as prominent as Friedman are complicit enough in the torture issue that they'll find a way to conclude that, while torture is bad, bad, bad, it would have been inhuman to have been too much against it immediately after 9/11. (Just as The New Republic, after Reagan's death, acknowledged that the hawks had insanely exaggerated the strength of the Soviet Union in its last decades, only to add that anyone who saw the situation more clearly and accurately was "irresponsible.") If anything, Cheney is postponing the moment of judgment by keeping himself in the public eye. People will be able to put their guilty feelings about torture aside a lot faster when they can do it without feeling that they and Dick Cheney are on the same team.

Lost and Found

A month or so ago, while I was already in the midst of a sabbatical, a mishap wiped out three years of content from this site. Well, these things happen. My first question was whether or not anyone would notice, but in fact, this development did not go unremarked upon. As you might expect, based on my reputation as the Perry Como of bloggers, I tried to adopt a zen, que sera, sera approach. For one thing, the idea behind my absence from the blog had been that I needed to plow more of my time into the work that I get paid for, which in the last couple of years has principally been at Nerve--here, enjoy my thrilling interview with Outrage director Kirby Dick--and its film blog, the Screengrab. Then word came down that the Screengrab is shutting down at the end of this month. Some people would interpret this chain of events as God's way of telling him something.

Anyway, I figured the Experience material was gone for good, and can thank my dear friend David Rothschild for showing me that it could be unearthed and slowly, tediously, a piece at a goddamn time, re-posted at the site. I am in the process of doing just that even as I attempt to once again get some fresh content going here. You may well wonder why I think the world would be made a better place through the continuing availability of my three-year-old opinions and prose stylings. The egomania factor is not entirely to be discounted. However, I want to stress that I don't just support the preservation of my own outdated ramblings; a lifelong magazine junkie and pack rat, I have a passion for outdated ramblings, which I believe are valuable not just for the personal qualities of an interesting writer's work, but for the way they can bring back the flavor and mindset of a time in recent history. I am, in fact, a compulsive reader of other people's archives, and not just online: right now, my bedside reading pile includes a stack of back issues of Dwight Macdonald's Politics magazine from the 1940s, I. F. Stone's Weekly from the late '60s, and most crucially, a pile of A. J. Liebling collections. Liebling, the longtime New Yorker staffer who said, "I can write faster than anyone who can write better and I can write better than anyone who can write faster", has been a great hero of mine since I discovered him in high school, starting out with the funniest book ever written about Louisiana politics (The Earl of Louisiana), the boxing piece assembled for The Sweet Science, and the articles, only some of them collected in his book The Press, that established him as the only man I know who ever fully earned the title "journalism critic." When I was a wee tad, you got ahold of the collections Liebling Abroad and Liebling at Home, published in the early '80s in the wake of Raymond Sokolov's biography of the great man, and then you hit the used book palaces. In the last several months, Liebling has been inducted into the Library of America, making a whole lot but not enough of his writing available in two of those handsome, easily portable, thick little volumes that those angels put out. If you haven't already read everything in them, I don't know why you're wasting your time reading this.

Going through the archives to do all this re-posting has been an interesting experience for me: it's humbling to realize how little of this stuff I would have ever remembered writing if I hadn't had it in front of me. I sort of feel as if I should take this opportunity to improve the original copy by taking advantage of what I've learned since then about using paragraph breaks and pictures to break up the monotonous flow of words, words, words. Maybe I'll go back and do something about that later, if it turns out I'm really insane. For now, I'm pretty much just pulling the stuff back aboard and slopping it into place, though I have corrected the odd, egregious spelling mistake; when your stock in trade is calling other people idiots, it can be very embarrassing to notice that you've misspelled "incompetent." Anyway, it's coming back in some form or other, though while I'm re-arranging the furniture, there will be stretches where the stuff below is way out of chronological order, reflecting the jumbled makeup of my mind over the course of the past three years. Until it's all straightened out, think of it as my homage to Lost.



I was meaning to get to Lost, actually. I've watched the show faithfully since its first episode, never missing it--though, as any dip into Lostpedia only serves to remind me, I've still managed to forget quite a lot of it. The thing is, while I've stuck with it, for most of its run, I sort of regarded it as a shuck. By which I mean that, not only did I believe that it would never resolve itself in any satisfying or meaningful way, but that I didn't think it was about anything except the effort to keep all those balls in the air. The balls themselves were fancy and colorful enough to keep me amused, and I kept tuning in for that. And also, I figured that there would come a point when the balls would hit the ground and smash apart in a spectacular fashion. Or to put it another way, I wanted to be there when this sucker jumped the shark. I figured that, as stories to tell the grandchildren go, it might be the closest I'd ever get to being an eyewitness to the explosion of the Hindenburg.

A funny thing happened to Lost a season ago, though: it suddenly became very compelling. The shift from flash-backs to the characters' lives before the plane crash to flash-forwards to their lives after their rescue seemed to somehow raise the stakes to an exceptional degree, and by now, the show has that degree of fascination that can only come from being about something besides the necessity of keeping enough people hooked that you can come back for another season and do it some more. It's about the art of the con, which Melville, a long ways off from Bernard Madioff and "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," saw as the true basis of the American system. This is clearest in the evolution of the character John Locke (the magnificent Terry O'Quinn), who, we can finally saw, never really evolved at all. There were hints all the way through the series that Locke was less than he wanted to believe he was, and less than we, the audience, wanted to believe he was; usually these were greeted by my friends who watched the show, and by myself, as grunts of disgust that the show was doing so badly by the character, that his essence had gotten mislaid as he began to do stupid things out of what seemed to be necessity for the writers, who wanted to push the action this way or that. But the show was playing fair after all, and even trying to tell us something about Locke--whose late-blooming, mystical heroism we wanted to believe in--that we didn't want to hear. Unable to shut off the movie in his head about his own redemption and apotheosis, incapable of appreciating what he had, he was a lifelong patsy, getting played by his father and by Ben and finally getting "played"--in every sense of the word--by the saturnine fellow first seen sneering at Jacob on the beach. (The message boards are already calling this worthy "Esau", which is apparently a Biblical reference. One of these days I have got to finish reading that book.) And the show played us.

People who write for serial TV shows have to have a lot of con artist in them. They have to know how to bait a hook to keep the audience coming back, and sometimes the most talented ones with the most on their minds will resort, when they're really desperate (or have grown over confident) to something that the hardened TV viewer may find borderline insulting: hey, everybody, Tony Soprano has a cousin with the same name who's always been like a brother to him who's just never been mentioned once in the three years we've known him! (Joss Whedon parodied this kind of thing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when he hooked his heroine up with a little sister the audience had never known she'd had and took his time about letting us discover that she wasn't really her little sister after all--which meant teasing the audience with the possibility that the show had lost a few I.Q. points. Incidentally, Whedon's new series Dollhouse, which has reportedly been, thank God, renewed for a second season, developed into a fascinating show with a remarkably icy attitude towards its characters--undercutting its crusading hero by revealing him to be a blundering tool with a self-destructive Lancelot complex, and undercutting its more fearsome, anti-heroic figures by revealing their lonely, self-loathing sides, but it earned its initial bad reviews with a steady stream of dreadful episodes at the beginning of its run. In those early shows, Whedon did some things that would resonate later in the season, when the big picture came into play, but he barely seemed interesting in baiting the hook properly. There are a couple of different ways to go off-balance.) To say that Lost is about confidence games is to say that it is about what it itself embodies.

I don't want to go off the deep end here, to start invoking Borges and using words like "metatextual"; for one thing, I'd think I'd lost my own damn mind. But there's practically a tradition now of con-game entertainments that attempt to con the audience. The Sting did it, and so does David Mamet in those movies of his, like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, which stage con games with so little extra character or dramatic interest that it's as if he saw the cons themselves as classic dramatic texts to be staged for the camera, no different than The Winslow Boy. One thing that all these entertainments have in common is that the audience can generally see the con coming from a mile away; at least, I always have. Lost suckered me, though; it got me caught up in it, more deeper than I realized, and then it pulled the rug out from under me, in a way that I could have anticipated had I cared less about wanting things in the show to go a certain way, for certain things about certain characters to be true. Suckering the mark is not the highest goal to which a storyteller can aspire, but it's harder to do than David Mamet realizes, and Lost did it with panache, and then some. They now have one more season to bring it all to some kind of conclusion without making it all seem to count for less. I'm less inclined to bet against them now than I used to be.

10

My year-end movies list for the Screengrab. I should maybe mention, lest you think I'm actually qualified to weigh in on something like this, that I still haven't seen the Indiana Jones movie. Dishes were piling up in the sink, the phone kept ringing, you know how it gets.

Update in Progress

We're reposting the archives posts on the blog, which will be coming back in reverse chronological order (unfortunately, we can't get them back to the original urls, so the links to older entries won't work. (Anyone know how to fix that?) Apologies for any problems this causes for your RSS feeds.

Update: The import of the archives has been stalled, as Google has tagged the 50 or so "new" posts as possible spam and instituted "word verification" on any further posts, which screws up our importing.