The Third Age: Episode Three: 'Static' and More Self Promo

Sorry for not posting much substantive content in the past few weeks. I've got a bunch of Decade and Year wrap up stuff in the works, but for now, it's time for more about the projects I'm working on. First off, the third episode of The Third Age...



This is my favorite of the first three, and if you haven't checked it out at all yet, this is the perfect time to go back and watch from the start, since the first three form something of a unit.

Also, you can check out a writeup of the upcoming Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods on Wired. Enjoy some words from me, as well as a couple of exclusive clips of Grant speaking about our world vs. superhero worlds, and the George Bush administration. Exciting to see it getting so much publicity, it's always weird to see yourself turn up on the sites in your RSS feed.

What he says about the Bush administration is particularly relevant in light of the rapid deterioration of the Obama administration and his insanely misguided decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. We as a nation cannot have it all, we have to prioritize and it's sickening to watch people prioritize spending billions more on killing people in a futile war when we can't get a health care bill, or to go to war in service of 'freedom' with an army that doesn't allow openly gay people to serve for a country were gay people can't get married. Really strange stuff, and Obama is making no effort to be a leader and make a change happen. With this decision about Afghanistan, he's ensured that I'll be seeking out a third party candidate in the 2012 election.

A New Era for America...And Fiction?

I haven’t said anything on here about the major event that happened last week, the election of Obama as president. It’s a huge thing, and a great step forward for the country. How well will things actually turn out? Can he undo all the awful things done by the Bush administration? It’ll be a while before we have the answers to those questions, but I think there is a tangible hope about the country’s direction now, a major contrast from the Bush era post 9/11 loss of agency and hope that we could ever have something better.

Back in 2000, the major narrative of the election was, there’s no difference between the two parties, they’re just two sides of the same coin. Hearing that today, that Bush and Gore are the same, it sounds absurd. A lot of people say that it doesn’t matter who’s president, things will be corrupt all the same no matter who’s in power. I think the Bush administration has proven that decisively wrong. Bush has remade the government in his image, he’s created two wars based on lies, both the “war on terror” and Iraq, and fundamentally changed the tax structure, such that Obama’s attempt to go back to what’s essentially the Clinton era tax system is called socialism. If Bush was not elected, we would not have gone to war in Iraq, I think that’s the best testament to the fact that who is in power does matter.

Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to make a mess than to clean things up, and if there’s one major worry about the Obama administration, it’s that people will jump all over him too quick, and say that he’s failing before he even has a chance to get started. But, ideally he’ll be able to do something different and make the world a better place.

The political climate of the nation influences a lot more than just policy, look at the pop culture that’s emerged in the Bush administration, everything is dark and brutal. Once goofy, over the top characters like Batman and James Bond have been reimagined as starkly realistic warriors in a morally corrupt world. I think the resonance of works like Casino Royale and The Dark Knight is largely due to a general pessimism in the world, a feeling that there’s no time for frivolity, even our blockbuster films have to be grounded in reality. While they’re really strong movies, a vast improvement from the goofy excesses of late Clinton era Bond and Batman, both films are notable for the fact that the heroes get very little joy from what they’re doing. They’re on a mission, and are constantly forced to sacrifice elements of their humanity as the films go along.

Grant Morrison is always perceptive about the cultural climate his work goes out into. The day-glo pop optimism of late period Invisibles fits perfectly with a world where the Cold War has just ended, and for the first time in fifty years, we had no enemy to battle. That’s exactly what happens in the story, this illusory war collapses and the characters are liberated to move on to the next stage of humanity. But, a year after the series ended, we got a new illusory war, one that sounds like something Sir Miles would jokingly propose, a “war on terror.” Think how absurd and sci-fi that sounds. It’s like Jack Kirby in the middle of the Fourth World. In a world where we fight imaginary wars, maybe our fiction has to be hard edged and brutal, as if we’re trying to make those wars real. Couldn’t you read The Dark Knight as an elaborate Bush era fantasy, this chaos is what will happen if we don’t have total control.

The position of chaos in popular mythology says a lot about the culture we’re living in. The Dark Knight is about a character fighting to keep the world in check, to hold back change and preserve the status quo. Compare to the Clinton era opus, The Matrix, which posits super-cool chaos warriors who go through the world destroying all symbols of authority in their path. Part of the reason that the later Matrix films failed is likely that people found it harder to relate to characters who want to destroy the status quo after suffering through an event like 9/11. Neo and Trinity are the kind of characters that Batman would be taking on in his attempt to keep a fragile hold on order.

Part of the reason why I find Morrison’s work on Final Crisis and particularly Batman RIP so interesting is that it’s so distinctively tied to the world we’re living in now, a dramatization of the end of the Bush era. Final Crisis’ Slayer album cover aesthetic is all in service of a story that’s designed to “let evil win,” before bringing things back in an explosive burst of hope. It’s a way to exorcise our demons, to pass through the ultimate terror and show that humanity will always come out strong. It’s appropriate that the last issue of Final Crisis will come out within a week of Obama’s inauguration, to kick start the new era.

RIP is even more interesting because of the way it turns Batman from a protector of order into his own force of chaos. Pretty much all the Batman films are dominated by their villains, Morrison’s great achievement is to make Batman himself the most interesting character in the comic. Over the course of RIP, we see a guy who’s exerting all his mental energy trying to maintain control, to hold back the force of chaos. In doing so, he finds himself in a war against the Black Glove, an uber-powerful organization that is so devious, he can never hope to defeat it. It’s Batman’s own war on terror, and one of the most powerful scenes in the arc is when Jezebel suggests that Bruce himself was the one who created the Black Glove, because he couldn’t deal with not having an enemy to fight. He is addicted to being Batman, and having this ultimate enemy, one he can never defeat, justifies the billions of dollars he spends on gear.

There’s a pointed criticism of the military-industrial complex there. Jezebel ponders what the money he’s spent being Batman could have done in a third world country. Instead, Bruce chose to fight a war that will never end, a war that eventually upsets his mental state and turns him from an agent of order to an agent of chaos.

It’ll probably take a few years before we see works that reflect an Obama era view of the world, but I think we will see a move away from the intense emphasis on ‘realism’ and darkness. If the world becomes a better place, art will reflect that too. Maybe in the next Bond movie, James will finally be able to have a little fun without feeling so guilty about it.

Conventional Wisdom

I saw a lot of the Democratic convention, and some of the Republican convention so far, during my down time at work. The difference so far is pretty striking. The Democrats have finally, finally, got their act together and moved beyond the ineffective pushovers who so utterly failed during both the 2004 campaign and the last eight years of governing. In terms of policy, I don’t think Obama is particularly revolutionary, but what he’s able to do better than any politician in my lifetime is to speak in a way that makes you feel like he can make the world a different, better place. The right may try to take him down, but he’s got a bright power that will hopefully not be dimmed.

Obama’s speech was pretty riveting, a great critique of John McCain, and a positive vision of our country’s future. The essence of what he’s saying is we can be better than this. That’s a message that’s going to trouble people who are insecure, who don’t want to deal with the fact that they’re in a changing world, they won’t live the way their parents did. I see that as a good thing, not everyone does. What excites me about Obama’s leadership is not so much his specific policy, which was some room for improvement, it’s the way he can change the game, and redefine what the status quo is in politics.

Ironically, the Republicans are also ranting about the ‘establishment,’ ‘Washington’ and ‘politics as usual.’ Watching the convention is what it must be like watching This is Spinal Tap and not knowing if it’s for real or not. What they’re saying is so ridiculous, so patently false and ironic that it would be very easy to read the entire thing as an elaborate, oh so subtle gag. It starts with the party that has had total control over Washington for the past eight years saying that they’re going to go in and clean things up, not that Washington insider who’s beloved by the ‘liberal media,’ Barack Obama. I think the buildup to the Iraq War ended the myth of the liberal media, but apparently it lives on.

Fred Thompson also said “She is from a small town, with small town values, but that's not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family.” That they’re still going for the values thing after the pregnancy business is pretty bold, and totally disconnected from reality. But, the whole pregnancy thing is a sideshow, small town values might be fine for people in a small town, they’re not so good when it comes to running the entire world. I could care less if Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant, what I care about is that she thinks it’s acceptable to have guns in peoples’ homes, and that she actually goes hunting herself. If shooting things is a small town value, perhaps it’s best to stay with the ‘beltway elite.’

An even better comedic performance was Joe Lieberman’s speech, though he perhaps pushed things a bit too far with his repeated references to Democrats’ inability to “reach across the aisle.” It absolutely baffles me that nobody is out right shooting down the Republican discussion of Democrats not being able to work with Republicans, and thinking more about party than country. Republicans have been able to do whatever they wanted with essentially no opposition for much of the past eight years. They gave away vast sums of money to the very few elite richest Americans through a restructuring of the tax code and an illegal invasion of Iraq. The Democrats just sat there and took it while Republicans tortured people in secret government sanctioned prisons. It’s horrifically ironic to watch Republicans cite John McCain’s five years in a Vietnamese prison as a qualification to be president, if so, we should look forward to a generation of Arab Americans running for the Republican party nomination in a few years. They all have the requisite ‘experience’ that McCain is so proud of.

Anyway, Republicans criticizing Democrats for not working with them is like the schoolyard bully complaining that the kid he’s beating up isn’t working an extra job to give him more lunch money. The Republican party right now is at the absolute extreme right wing, Democrats are roughly in the center, they are inherently compromising on virtually everything they are doing. Barack Obama’s voting record is one of the more liberal in the Senate, but looked at objectively, it’s far less partisan than the totally united block of Republican senators who will shoot down any Democratic initiative. Honestly, can’t somebody besides John Stewart and Bill Maher call these people out on the ridiculous things they’re saying?

The Joe Lieberman speech was a travesty. The John McCain Republicans speak of is not the man who’s there today, the man who said himself that he voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. People talk about experience being an issue. This is my final statement on that. George Bush presented a case for war in Iraq that may or may not have been a deliberate lie. Either way, it turned out to be false. One candidate in the race saw that the case was not justified and voted against the war. One was swayed by false evidence and sent us to the one trillion dollar sinkhole we’re stuck in now. If that same evidence comes along again, I want the man who had the experience to make the right choice the first time. That one trillion dollars could have remade the entire world, and that’s nothing to mention the myriad lives extinguished by Bush’s illegal invasion. Obama may not be a perfect candidate, but he will at least try to lead us to a better world, and he’s the first politician in a while who has a legitimate chance of making it there.

The Mythology of Obama/McCain

It bothers me when people invariably hold up so called ‘realistic’ works of art as more important and relevant than science fiction or other ‘genre’ works. For one, ‘realism’ is just as much a construction as ‘subjectivity’ or sci-fi. The Wire is only realistic because that style of writing and acting hews to today’s definition of realism in art. Yesterday’s ‘realism,’ think a 50s Brando performance, can look mannered today, in the way that I’m sure one day The Wire will feel just as mannered.

The Wire tells us a lot about the world we live in, but it’s not all in the ‘realistic’ depiction of events, it’s largely the editing and story construction, which juxtaposes various sectors of society against each other, that reveals the hidden connections and chain of events that hurt people. A work like The Corner can be emotionally devastating, but without seeing the whole picture, the work doesn’t reveal as much about the world.

All of this is a way of saying that sometimes it takes a constructed situation to reveal what’s really going on in the world. It’s hard to make movies directly commenting on the political reality of the world we live in, things change so fast, talking about specific events can seem instantly dated. I think part of that is also a lack of courage on the part of filmmakers. Every Iraq War film tries to take on this ‘objective’ point of view, to be apolitical, which I think is irresponsible. Nobody wants to watch a two hour essay on why the Iraq War is bad, but at the same time, it is bad, and I think there’s plenty of great material about the specific failures of the Iraq War.

For me, the only great war movie ever made is Apocalypse Now. It’s the only film that puts you in the subjective experience of war. Watching the film, you see how people could kill, because they’re in such a totally insane world. The entire film is subjective, a psychological journey as much as a physical one. It’s not necessarily a political film, but the folly of Vietnam is present in every frame. It captured the psychedelic insanity of that war, and I think we need a film that could do the same for Iraq, and the disastrous buildup to the war.

The only work I’ve seen that really got to the core of what Iraq is about is the New Caprica arc on Battlestar Galactica. It’s a work that isn’t explicitly about Iraq, and that lets it cast our heroes as the Iraqis, and portrays the Americans as a vast impersonal invasion force. It’s intensely relevant, but also riveting filmmaking. The whole war in Iraq story is pretty unbelievable, a war for imaginary weapons that was won five years ago but wages on with no end in sight. A war that costs billions of dollars, but no one really cares about. It’s a war that everyone wants to be over, but no one will end. It’s a war that can perhaps best be expressed in mythic terms, we’re in a world that is at the midst of a vast ideological struggle between a progressive force and a regressive, violent force. It’s a war that is eternal, and has taken many forms. It’s the war of The Invisibles, it’s the war of The Fourth World, it’s the war of Star Wars. It’s not a war at all, it’s a rescue mission.

All of this is a buildup to discussing the recent John McCain ad, in which he claims that Barack Obama is “the one.” He quite literally evokes Joseph Campbell’s Heroic mythology to position Obama as the savior come to deliver us from an age of darkness. And, watching the ad, it vexed me. Couldn’t this be an Obama ad, a beloved savior here to make the world better. It’s not until I got to the Moses section of the ad that I realized the whole thing is meant as satire, a sarcastic rebuke of Obama’s rhetoric from a profoundly cynical man. I complained in the past that the Democrats were all Daily Show liberals, happier to joke about Bush’s ineptitude and language slips than to offer an alternative to his policy. But, it seems things have flipped, Obama is the one offering a vision of a better America while McCain is the guy heckling him offstage.

It really bothers me that McCain would choose this tactic because I think it can undermine virtually everything positive that Obama represents. I don’t think Obama is that different from other politicians when it comes to policy, he’s made a few too many compromises for my taste, he’s better than most, but I’d like to see him go further. Still, a while ago I realized that specific policy might be not be as important as the overall impression a candidate makes.

Obama’s presentation, the invocation of a new era can be more important than any policy. Bush’s genius was to create a political world in which his ideas were right, and anyone who disagreed with him was un-American. It became difficult to present new ideas because he could claim that anyone who disagreed with him was with the terrorists, or was disgracing the memory of 9/11, or something like that. The Democrats had to play the Republican game, claim that they were stronger than the Republicans on security. That’s why we went to war in Iraq, because politicians were afraid to oppose it, fearing being called weak when it came time to run for higher office. The poetic justice of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton’s votes on the war is that they voted for political reasons, and that vote wound up destroying their campaigns. It’s fitting that they should find that fate, having chosen politics over principle.

So, Obama is giving us a new hope, a vision of a better world. What is McCain offering? “Experience?” Yes, McCain has experience, experience of failing. His implicit message is vote for Obama and be attacked by a terrorist. But, he already betrayed our so called ‘war on terror’ by supporting the war in Iraq. He chose to vote to go to war on a lie, so he either got duped by Bush’s pitch, or he for some reason chose to invade a country that was no threat to us. If he was sold by Bush’s pitch, that means he can be easily swayed by lies, and is likely to put America in danger again. If he really thought it was smart to invade Iraq for no particular reason, then he’s a rash extremist, prone to violence. Or, perhaps he really does think it’s America’s duty to spread democracy to the rest of the world, by any means necessary.

In that case, isn’t it a noble calling, something to be proud of? Of course, that’s not really it. McCain has no backbone, no beliefs beyond perpetuating the military industrial complex. And that’s why he’s become the guy in the back of the movie theater throwing wisecracks at a serious film that people are listening to. His goal seems to be to so thoroughly shred Obama that by the end he doesn’t win, he makes Obama lose. He is the Archons from The Invisibles, trying to preserve the status quo through fear, not wanting things to be any different, any better than they are now. He is literally fearmongering, making people think that any change in their lives is invariably going to be for the worst, that we’re perilously clinging to the way things are.

If Obama really is “the one” as McCain says, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t a good thing to be loved by the rest of the world, isn’t it a good thing to want to change the world? Isn’t this what the country’s ‘forefathers,’ so beloved by Republicans, intended. America is an experiment, it should evolve and change with the times. That’s what Obama is trying to do, and that’s why the cruel heckles of McCain are perhaps the greatest endorsement of Obama. The movie trailer practically writes itself: “In a nation’s darkest hour, one man will rise to save them all.” Obama, incarnates a twenty-first century vision of progress, a blend of races and ideas, he has transcended all manner of obstacles to come this close to the presidency. To elect him will send a message to the world that we’re ready to make the world better.

Distilled to its essence, this story is a myth as old as time. He is a messiah figure, a contemporary incarnation of a classic archetype, caught up in an eternal struggle. To simply depict the reality of events doesn’t tell the whole story, we need to look at it in the context of the eternal human mythology, which McCain has conveniently done for us. Cast in that light, who’s going to vote for Darth Vader instead of Luke Skywalker? Who's hoping the sentinels will destroy the X-Men? Who wants the past to stop the future coming?

Dissent is The Essence of American

The US has been through a lot of awful stuff over the past few years, but this week brought what I’d consider the most ridiculous government legislation so far, the condemnation of a MoveOn.org ad which criticized General Petraeus. There’s a number of reasons this really bothers me, more than all the other shit that’s been foisted on us by Bush and his crew, and this incident as much as any other sums up why the Bush team is still so powerful, and why the Democratic party is such a pathetic bunch of cowards who won’t really change anything if they’re elected.

Back in 2006, I wrote: “The critical thing after 9/11 was the construction of the idea that to not support American aggression was to be anti-American, to oppose Bush's policies was to be a traitor. This was evident in the Dixie Chicks controversy, how could having a difference of opinion mean being anti-American? Isn't the whole point of freedom having the option of doing and saying whatever you want? But as constructed by Bush, it's an us vs. them, the "free world" vs. the axis of evil.” Since then, there’s been a massive erosion of support for Bush, the vast majority of people are incredibly dissatisfied with the way the war in Iraq is going, yet no one is standing up to combat the Bush administration.

The Democrats got elected on the promise that they would end the war, however, they’ve done absolutely nothing. Now, the president’s veto power means they can’t do whatever they want, but that’s not an excuse to do nothing. They should be passing bills cutting funding for Iraq all the time, and forcing Bush to veto them, put the responsibility for every American death firmly on Bush and whoever voted for that legislation, where it belongs. Of course, the Democrats are so incredibly pathetic, they can’t even censure Bush for his execution of the war. It’s pretty sad.

But things got sadder this week when we got this condemnation of an ad. I don’t understand how people running a nation that was founded on criticizing exiting order can legitimately be angry at a group for criticizing the handling of this war through an attack on the man handling it. It’s absolutely perplexing to me, and I’d love to hear someone try to defend it as anything other than pure politics. The Republicans are absolutely shameless to call this ad disgusting, but have no problem with the tens of thousands of people that George Bush killed with his war in Iraq.

But, the saddest thing for me is that Democrats not only voted for the condemnation, but actually tried to expand its reach and further diminish free speech. It’s unbelievable hypocrisy to criticize MoveOn for attacking Petraeus after the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, but condemning those attacks three years after the fact isn’t going to do anything. Where the fuck was the attack on Republicans then, particularly when Bush was attacking anyone who attacked his “military service.” That’s one the greatest testaments to their patheticness, even when their candidate actually fought in the war, they lose the military cred.

Now, I think running from Kerry’s anti-war record was a huge mistake. The protest movement in Vietnam was one of the proudest moments in our nation’s history, a moment when people tried to fight back and not just accept the will of the government. Kerry was a hero for that, not for his service in Vietnam. The soldiers in Iraq and Vietnam are not heroes, they are victims. Bush does not care about the soldiers, he does not support them and he does not respect them, nor do any of the Republicans who sent them into war for no good reason.

But, that’s just my opinion. Would I condemn someone who thought otherwise? No, and that’s why anyone who voted for the condemnation will never have my support again. I can’t respect someone who says it’s wrong to criticize the military because that is not wrong, sometimes it’s the only way to create change. No institution in this country is above critique because no institution is perfect, and they never will be, we always can be better and we should strive for that.

Inherent in conservative politics by its very definition is the notion that things should remain the same. Because so many conservatives believe our nation is going downhill morally and socially, they respond to politicians who talk about the good old days and traditional values. Guess what, the good old days never existed, the moments they lionize were marred by racial prejudice and suppression of groups based on their gender and religion. We’re still far from perfect, but I’d rather see politicians who imagine a better future, and fight for that.

It’s unbelievable that some of the people in power remain in power considering the stupid things they say. I hear people say evolution doesn’t exist, that’s patently wrong, I thought we cleared the issue up in the 1920s. How could you trust someone who denies the existence of evolution to run our schools? And, evolution and God are not mutually exclusive, the way I see it, evolution is the engine designed to make us all better. Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey, evolution is moving us closer to godliness.

Beyond that, it’s hard to believe that people making hate speech against gay people can remain in office. Humanity’s destiny is towards acceptance and unity, we’ve knocked down a whole bunch of divisions, and prejudice based on sexual orientation is the next to go. The politicians who don’t support gay marriage today are the ones who would have supported slavery and the oppression of women years ago. It’s the same belief in a new guise, and soon, this barrier will fall like others in the past have. We are destined for greatness, but need to overcome these temporary obstacles.

The problem is, the Republicans still control the game. That’s why criticizing the military is analogous to treason, it’s the same as the Dixie Chicks controversy from a few years ago. They want to make dissent with the party line un-American, when in reality, dissent is the essence of America, and even the essence of the Christianity they all value so. Jesus was a revolutionary who upended social order, just because something has become an institution doesn’t mean it must lose the spark of change that ignited it. That is the core American and Christian value, not the imagined values of a time that never was the Republicans present us with now.

But, because they control the game, everyone is pushing towards the right. Democratic candidates refuse to really oppose the war, when in reality they should be fighting it hard. People hate the war, but this small group of extremists has captured our government and the idea space in America. Democrats must define themselves in relation the Republican values because they don’t really stand for anything. I’ll freely admit that, but it doesn’t mean we can’t dream of something better. Hate and fear have possessed our politics, and no one is willing to fight it with love and progress. Republicans would have you believe they are an oppressed group fighting for mainstream values against a small bunch of extremists who control the media and cultural dialogue. That would be hilarious if it wasn’t actually being said, Bush and his crew are the extremists, completely out of touch with the mainstream.

Sadly, most Democrats don’t really do anything. They are cowered by the brilliant attacks Republicans threw at previous candidates. Bush ran in 2000 on responsible fiscal management and a refusal to go on nation building military expeditions, but it’s Kerry who was tagged as a flip flopper. Once that tag was on, there was nothing he could do to combat it because everyone has slight variations in belief over time, that’s evolution. But, that adaptation was characterized as weakness.

This inaction is enforced by the fact that it feels like average people can’t do anything to enact change. No march or petition is going to stop the war in Iraq, and I get the distinct sense people can’t do anything but laugh at the situation, hence the popularity of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. But, laughing at it isn’t going to make it go away, and until a really dynamic, exciting leader comes along, we’ll have to just wait for time to change the game and push the Bush agenda away. But, with ridiculousness like Rudy Giuliani’s sudden belief in guns for everyone and the constant use of 9/11 as justification for everything, that could be a long time.

United 93

I didn't see United 93 when it came out, not because it was 'too soon,' rather because I'd heard it described as a non-political straight ahead thriller. After seeing the film, I would agree that it is thrilling, one of the most tense, exciting films of the year, but in retrospect, it's an essentially pointless film. The film is entirely dependent on our outside cultural knowledge for its impact, if you look at the film as a standalone entity, what makes this different than countless B action movies, where our hero triumphantly defeats some ethnic terrorists to ensure the safety of America?

After watching Schindler's List, I wrote this post, discussing the impossibility of making a good film about a culturally charged real event. What does make a film about the Holocaust fifty years later tell us, other than that something awful happened and we shouldn't let it happen again. That may be a valid message, but it's not a particularly interesting one. Setting a film in the historical past always drains it of urgency. With rare exceptions, like Barry Lyndon, there's no vitality or importance to films set in the past, they've already happened and made their cultural impact. I don't think there's anything shocking in Schindler's List, you go in knowing what to expect, and receive the emotional charge that was expected.

Unlike Schindler's List, United 93 is set a mere five years ago, and as a result, it should have more relevance to today's political scene. The film was so charged that people criticized it for coming 'too soon' after the event. After seeing the film, I have to say this film is about four years too late. In the six months or so after the event, 9/11 was a tragedy, after that it became a political object, endlessly distorted to serve the interests of a President out to create a war without end. Even this week, Bush was using 9/11 to justify the war in Iraq and a potential invasion of Iran. The destruction of the towers was an awful event, but the real tragedy is how Bush used what happened to forward his agenda, and actually wound up killing more Americans than the terrorists did on that day.

For me, that is what 9/11 is now, and to make a film like United 93 that naively addresses the day itself without any comment about what would happen after seems hopelessly dated. This is the sort of film we needed a year after the event, as a way of processing things. I think the film does a wonderful job of capturing the shock of the day, the disbelief of the air traffic controllers who laugh at a hijacking as something quaint. Watching those sequences has heavy dramatic irony, we know what's going to happen and want these characters to figure things out. Of course, we know they don't, and in a stunning sequence, the air traffic controllers at Newark watch the plane hit the tower.

That sequence has a lot of power, but it doesn't really earn the power, it just uses a culturally charged image to produce a reaction. In the world of this film, why should we care about anything that happens to the vast, anonymous cast? Now, I think it wouldn't have worked to give obvious emotional hooks to what's going on, but I think Elephant gives a good model for how to use a cultural tragedy in the service of ideas, rather than just recreating something on screen. In Elephant, we see various viginettes showing characters' everyday lives. These viginettes are interesting on their own terms, and we know just enough about the characters to identify with them. I think Elephant would have been a good film without the school shooting ending, but with the ending, it becomes a great one. Van Sant uses the cultural memory of Columbine, and then deflates that mythology, bringing it down the brutal reality of just a frustrated kid with too many guns.

In some respects, I think that was the goal of this film, to bring 9/11 down to a personal level, but it just doesn't succeed. It makes no sense to cut between five different air traffic control rooms. It's just a bunch of anonymous characters talking about the same stuff. I think it would have been more effective to focus on one guy's journey through that day.

The parts on the plane were more effective, but to me, the film just felt like an episode of 24. It was really exciting to watch the passengers prepare their resistance and I was rooting for them as they rushed the cockpit and things descended into chaos. I loved the filmmaking in those final moments, a rush of chaotic camera moves, blood and violence everywhere, as the plane descends toward the ground in a fantastic closing sequence. But, really, what did this film do that 24 hasn't done? It's that same embrace of the essentially conservative action message, cheering on as Americans take down some foreigners. Harrison Ford might as well have been on there telling the terrorists to "get off my plane."

If the filmmakers' mission was to create a compelling action film, I think they succeeded, though from that point of view, I've got to question the lengthy air traffic controller stuff. If the goal was to make us experience what these people felt on 9/11, I think that was pretty much accomplished. But, if the goal was to make us think about the days' events in a different way, I think they failed.

A mere two weeks after 9/11, 24 began, and as the show has progressed, it's been a barometer of post 9/11 thought, an alternate America constantly under attack from terrorists, where torture has seemingly become the only alternative, and a place where the president and big business are constantly working together to create a feeling of terror among the American people. The show has no consistent message about our post 9/11 world, but the schizophrenic mix of liberal and conservative paranoia is precisely what makes the show so relevant for today's world.

And, two years after 9/11, Ron Moore made the new Battlestar Galactica , a work that essentially takes 9/11 into a sci-fi context, and in that work, he creates an emotionally devestating, riveting piece of fiction that tells us a lot more about the way our society reacted to 9/11 than United 93 did. The miniseries was basically the same story as United 93, but full of more interesting characters and concepts, and a deeper exploration of what the attacks mean to society as a whole. Since then, the show has explored our post 9/11 society from every angle, and while the cinema was hinting at current problems with period pieces like Jarhead and Good Night and Good Luck, this season's opening New Caprica arc was the only important reaction to the War in Iraq that's been produced so far in cinema. Freed of the need to be historically accurate, and non-biased in representing real events, the show can get to the core of the issues that matter to our world today.

I think people need to realize that it's never too soon to address what's going on in our world. The War in Iraq is killing people everyday and cinema needs to address that fact. If we'd had films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket in the early 70s, maybe the Vietnam War wouldn't have gone on so long. Today's Iraq War is a massive catastrophe and it's time for filmmakers to stop being 'impartial' and start interrogating the reasons for this war and the culture it has created in dynamic, exciting ways, not just polemical documentaries. The way to do that might be through the use of genre, as in New Caprica, or maybe it's just in not trying to tell stories about our entire society, as in Syriana, and instead just focus on a few people and demonstrate the way their lives have been changed in this new world. Apocalypse Now doesn't indict the war through an in depth exploration of its causes and global consequences, it does so by immersing us in the mental space of the soldiers and showing that they're not liberators, not peace-bringers, they're just trying to survive in the chaos.

So, I enjoyed United 93 as an action thriller, but as a political or important film, it's grossly lacking. 9/11 isn't about the actual attack anymore, it's about the symbol that it's become for Bush's conservative agenda, that's the story that needs to be told and we can't wait until the time is 'right' for that to happen.

Michael Richards, Borat and the Limits of Shock Comedy

Over the past couple of days, Seinfeld star Michael Richards has gotten into a lot of the trouble for his racial invective filled rant at a comedy club. All the info is here, including videos of both the moment itself and the incredibly awkward six minute apology on Letterman. Obviously he said some really awful things, and I doubt he'll ever be able to shake the stigma of this, nor should he. If you're a public figure, no matter what you actually feel, you just don't say this stuff in public.

When I first heard about the story, I saw it as just another Mel Gibson type situation. The quotes from articles were horrible, and at first, his apology is a fairly standard "I didn't mean it" kind of thing. However, as he goes on, he talks about what led him to say these things. Basically, as a performer, he uses a lot of free association to move deep into character. His comedy is entirely based on stripping off self consciousness and getting lost in the material.

If you watch the video, it becomes more clear that what he's saying is to some extent a performance. After the initial comments, he steps back and says something like "Ooh, this shocks you?" After this, he goes even further and loses the audience in the process. The whole thing raises the question of where performance ends and where actual racism begins. If he's trying to maintain authority as a performer, he's going to want to prey on his hecklers and use their comments to his advantage. So, he plays on the easiest target, their race. The question is, is he entering into the character of a racist at this moment or is it is his own beliefs coming out?

I can't say for sure, but I think it's interesting that this controversy occurs only a few weeks after everyone is lauding Borat for supposedly exposing the below the surface intolerance of Americans. With Borat, Baron Cohen enters into a character and utters a consistent stream of hate speech, directed at blacks, Jews and others. To the people in the film, there's no indication that Borat is a construction, or that his beliefs are any less than genuine, he is using this character to create a safe space for people to express their hate.

But, at the same time, he is saying very hateful things. What makes his constant jokes about Jews different than what Richards does here? The obvious answer is the distinction between Borat and Cohen. Every review seems to mention the film's antisemitism, qualified with a remark about Cohen's own Orthodox background. It's easy for us to laugh at Borat because we're aware that he is poking fun at this point of view. The actual man is far removed from the character.

However, with Richards, there's no clear line between the character and the performer. It's quite possible that in that moment, he saw entering this racist persona as the best way to grab the crowd's attention and counter the hecklers. At first, he seems to enjoy the fact that his words have created such shock, and only after does the crowd turn on him. If you read Borat without the distance of knowing he's a fictional character, it'd be very easy to have the same reaction.

In the end, I think the difference in reaction comes down to three things. One is insider status. Seinfeld itself actually commented on this phenomenon when they had Tim Whatley convert to Judaism for the jokes. An oppressed group can make fun of themselves without consequence, but it's a lot tougher for someone outside the group to make those same jokes. Richards crosses an unacceptable social line by invoking actual hate speech.

The second major difference is the tone. Borat gets away with a lot of what he does because he's such a genial guy. There doesn't seem to be genuine malice behind what he's saying, whereas Richards, by his own admission, is fueled with rage and as a result, stops being funny. On Seinfeld, Kramer could get away with a lot of insensitive things because there was an innate innocence/naivete to the character, and Richards had none of that on stage.

I'm not going to pass judgment on Richards, but it's clear he crossed a line in the performance. I suppose that's the danger of being such a free performer, that you'll channel something you don't want out into the world, and I'd imagine we're not going to see him doing standup again.

But, so much of what is hailed about today's great comedies are their willingness to tackle taboo subjects. Shows like Arrested Development and The Office frequently use race in their humor, and it's notable that at first the audience on Letterman treats Richards' apology as a bit, with sporadic laughter until Jerry says "Stop laughing, it's not funny." Apparently, the show was taped before the scandal broke, and if you didn't know it was real, it'd be pretty easy to think that Richards' apology was a gag, pushing awkward comedy to its limits. Just the other day, I was saying the American Office didn't work because it wasn't painful enough. Well, this apology was painful and not very funny at all.

Weekend Update

The American Office

I finished watching the first season of the American Office, and it's better, but still nowhere near the British. The show's much broader, the UK characters did some ridiculous stuff, but it all felt plausible within the office environment. However, Michael Scott's out of the office in half the episodes, and in something like the basketball episode, it feels more like a club than an actual workplace. I love the awkwardness of office social gatherings in the quiz episode of the UK one, but at least that one happened after work, so it was plausible. I'm definitely laughing at the show, but it feels sort of like late season Seinfeld, to the UK's early Seinfeld. Early Seinfeld is painfully attuned to the way that real people interact, and the humor is mixed with pain at knowing that you're just like this. The American one is more just a well written wacky comedy. That said, I did really like the final scene in thep arking lot at the end of the first season, where all the characters go their seperate ways, each jealous of the others in some way.

The Box Office

This week saw the virtual death of Marie Antoinette at the box office, with only $2.5 million gross in it second week. I don't think it was going to be a blockbuster, but I know it's not playing near me here at Wesleyan, and I've talked to a bunch of people who wanted to see it, but couldn't. Same thing with The Science of Sleep. These are films that people want to see, and need to be released to more theaters. And the saddest thing is that an utterly hollow enterprise like Saw III winds up at the top of the box office. If I was running a studio, I would make these crappy horror films too, just because it's the only thing that people will reliably go to.

Media Censorship

I think it's really ridiculous that people will refuse to run ads for 'Death of a President' and the Dixie Chicks documentary. For DoaP, it's a piece of fiction! People aren't going to see this and all of a sudden to decide to assassinate George Bush. Did Elephant cause a rash of school shootings? I think considering the effect of an assassination is a very valid intellectual question, and the fact that people are unwilling to even ponder it is going against the principles on which the country was founded. It's not free speech for people you agree with. And that's where the Dixie Chicks issue comes in. Now, I lost respect for her when she apologized for making the comments about Bush. That was cowardly, but it's even more ridiculous to criticize someone for stating their opinion. Dissent is the very essence of what America was founded on, and saying that we can't debate a war while it's going on is a travesty.

This is the same logic that led people to say that we shouldn't "play the blame game" about Hurricane Katrina. When someone gets murdered, you don't call an investigation into who did it "the blame game," and Bush's actions led to hundreds of deaths. Why shouldn't we call him out on that so it doesn't happen again?

(Team) George Bush is a Genius

The whole George W. Bush presidency has been a series of increasingly awful things that he continues to get away with. It's so disturbing that you really have no choice but to laugh at it, and unfortunately, that's what most liberals do. As liberals laughed at the idiot president, the conservative right gradually reshaped this nation, and even though people may say he's stupid, George W. Bush was the perfect choice to be president.

Now, it's impossible for an outsider to really know what goes on behind the scenes, if Bush himself is a clueless patsy being manipulated, or someone who's so smart that he created that image precisely to create that perception.

Back in 2000, Bush was a joke, his misspoken phrases the stuff of a thousand forwarded e-mails, let right from the beginning, the ideas that would eventually cause this country so much harm were there. When the 2000 campaign was starting, Bush was seen as the frontrunner in the Republican party, at least until New Hampshire, when John McCain won the crucial first primary. Of course, in 1996, Pat Buchanan had won that primary and gone on to subsequent defeat, but McCain was a much more likely candidate than Buchanan.

McCain was campaigning as a reformer, comparing himself to the Rebel Alliance, and even using the theme from Star Wars as his theme song. At the same time, Bush was using his tagline "compassionate conservatism." After being beaten by McCain, it was pretty clear that team Bush was not happy, and thus they went to work utterly destroying him. In one of the moves that's so ridiculous it's funny, Bush decided to paint himself as an outsider, and used the tagline "A Reformer with Results," copying McCain and then attacking McCain for being part of the political establishment. Bush claimed that he was stronger on issues like the environment than McCain. This recalls stuff like his "Clear Skies" initiative, which lifted the restrictions on industry. Bush was the son of a president, he was more establishment than anyone, but he still painted himself as an outsider bringing the hammer of reform on a corrupt government, and people bought it.

In some respects, the idea of McCain winning was a bit unlikely, because of the soon to be pronounced blue state/red state divide. New Hampshire was more likely to support a reform candidate than the South, and Bush played to what would soon be firmly entrenched as his base. Bush won the primary by utterly destroying McCain in a very negative advertising campaign, by just taking what people liked about McCain and claiming it for himself.

At the time of the general election, there was still the strong perception that Bush was an idiot, not someone to be taken seriously. Rather than being a negative, this became the Republicans' greatest asset, being underestimated. What Bush combines is populism and elitism. He is simultaneously seen as one of the boys, an ordinary guy, while in actuality he is from one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in the country, and was being used as basically a frontman for conservative business interests.

So, when it came to the debates, the Republican machine created the impression that Al Gore was one of the greatest debaters in the world and Bush was an idiot who could barely string a sentence together. They put their people around saying things like "We're going to concede this one, no one can beat Gore." Then when Bush is able to coherently string a sentence together, it's seen as a moral victory for him, and the debate is ruled a draw.

One of the big things to come out of this debate was Gore's visible disgust with what Bush was saying. People said this was arrogant, ignoring the fact that the Bush campaign completely savaged McCain, and would later do much worse to Kerry. The other thing that was joked about was Gore's lockbox for the budget surplus. He called Bush's plan to give massive tax cuts to the top 1% of the country a "risky scheme," and instead proposed to put the money in a lockbox to use for social security down the line. Considering how things turned out, Bush's tax cuts were clearly more than a risky scheme, they were one of the dumbest budget decisions ever made. If the democrats weren't absoultely incompetent, they would have been able to show people that Bush is taking their money and giving it to rich people who could never spend all the money they have. People are literally buying tax cuts from him, and by today, the idea of a budget surplus is a distant memory, and with massive deficits, it's unclear how we'll support all the people going onto social security in a few years. Wouldn't it be nice to have that money in a lockbox?

And by the time we got to the general election, things got even more ridiculous. The 2000 election was one of the low points in this nation's history. Bush quite literally stole the election. Because his brother was in charge of voting in the state, could anyone honestly expect a fair assessment of things down there? The most ridiculous thing was when people said that Gore was being whiny by requesting additional vote counts. The Bush team presented the idea that just settling on him as president was what the nation needed, as if going another few weeks without the election decided would throw the nation into anarchy.

So, Republicans created the idea that they had won the election, and Gore was just being a sore loser by seeking a recount. This is classic policy, deciding the truth in advance and then just using whatever's needed to make it fit. The Supreme Court decided that election and it's sad that the vote of 9 people counted for more than the rest of the people in this country.

9/11 became the iconic moment of the Bush presidency, and a lot of people who didn't initially support him, got behind him then. At the time, that pretty much nullified ill feeling about the 2000 election and put the country together. However, I don't see how Bush's response to 9/11 was particularly good. He went to the wreckage with a firehat on, there's noting courageous about that, it's not like the terrorists were going to come back and attack him there. The way the media sold it, it was like he scurried into the towers before they collapsed and rescued some people.



And in the post 9/11 period, Bush did everything he could to assist his corporate friends, and as recent memos point out, on 9/11 itself, they were already planning the invasion of Iraq, using this national tragedy as a justification for enacting their policies, and at the same time, constructing a new political paradigm for the nation.

The critical thing after 9/11 was the construction of the idea that to not support American aggression was to be anti-American, to oppose Bush's policies was to be a traitor. This was evident in the Dixie Chicks controversy, how could having a difference of opinion mean being anti-American? Isn't the whole point of freedom having the option of doing and saying whatever you want? But as constructed by Bush, it's an us vs. them, the "free world" vs. the axis of evil.

While this was happening, he put through the absurd tax cuts that led to today's major budget deficits and started the war in Iraq, a conflict based completely on lies. I can understand the desire to go to Iraq and defeat Hussein, if they had sold the war as that, then people would at least have been able to make a legitimate decision. However, they presented Iraq as an urgent threat that needed to be dealt with before they attacked our nation with their WMDs.

Now, I don't understand how a country with the largest collection of weapons in the world can honestly say that the fact that a country has chemcial weapons is justification for attacking them. If two planes flown into a building is justification for attacking multiple countries, what would having your country invaded and bombed repeatedly be justification for? Honestly, if Iraq dropped a nuclear bomb on us now, could you honestly say that they weren't justified in doing so? I wouldn't be happy about it, but considering the way we've acted in the past few years, it's impossible to play the innocent victim act.

In 2004, Bush had started a war that was fast becoming a second Vietnam, thrown the budget to hell and stripped the nation of its rights, and yet he was still elected. Why? It's because the Republicans played such a good game.

The first mistake the Democrats made was choosing the utterly lifeless John Kerry as their nominee. I didn't want to vote for him, and in choosing such a non-person, they made the election about George Bush. The Republicans ran with this, completely controlling the playing field. They put Kerry on the defensive and by controlling the terms of the debate, ensured that he couldn't define his own identity.

This election is where I have to really respect the Republican campaign team, they play the game so well, you can only wish they were working for good. From the moment they invented the "flip flop" charge, they completely handicapped Kerry because any deviation from old positions was treated as a flip flop. This ties in with the completely flawed Bush idea that changing your mind, based on new assessment of the facts, is a weakness, and that you have to charge forth, never changing course. You can never admit a mistake for to do so is weak. That's how Bush thinks, and when he said that his greatest mistake was trading Sammy Sosa, he made this crystal clear. The man either saw no mistakes or was carefully tailoring his public persona to create this idea of a decisive, sure leader, while Kerry was a flip flopping, liberal who would rather talk with the terrorists than bomb them.

The fact that they used the idea that Kerry's idea of a more sensitive war on terror as a negative says so much about their mindset. Wouldn't understanding people be more likely to win the "war on terror" than bombing people, and creating more people who hate us. First, the idea of a war on terror is ridiculous, it's like a war on death. You're not going to win, terror isn't like the Nazis, there's no central place, all it takes is one guy, and you can never be truly safe. That's a fact of life. But, the best way to stop terrorism is to get to the core of the issues that create an anti-American mentality.

Of course, Kerry didn't really help his cause with his "I voted for it before I voted it against it" comments. His greatest problem was that he didn't present a clear alternative to Bush. His view on the war was basically, we're in it already, so there's nothing we can do. The democrats needed someone who would really say "This war was a crime" and perhaps Howard Dean could have done that, but he was criticized for being too angry. When Bush is doing the stuff he's doing, people should be angry.

Anyway, Kerry allowed himself to get played. The whole Swift Boat Veterans for Truth business was ridiculous, Bush was discrediting a veteran, the very people he's supposed to be supporting, and people were attacking Kerry for being anti-Vietnam. Honestly, people who didn't oppose the Vietnam War are the ones who should have been under fire. Kerry saw what the war was doing and opposed it, that makes sense, and it took a lot of guts for people who did everything they could to avoid going to war to criticize John Kerry's military service.

The problem with Kerry was he never really stuck it to Bush. The man was assaulting him, calling a coward, a bastard, and Kerry just took it. Why couldn't he just go at Bush with the same furor that Bush attacked him with. Call the lead up to war a lie, say the WMDs were made up, hell, make something up, it doesn't really matter, just attack the guy with fury. Instead at the convention, Kerry drops "Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn't make it so. And proclaiming "Mission accomplished" certainly doesn't make it so." This sums up the Democrat point of view, dropping these allusions to events. You need to say "George Bush made up weapons of mass destruction to send our country to war and thousands of people have died as a result. Every coffin that comes back from Iraq is there because of George Bush's fiction." And this would be a perfect opportunity to show the images of the coffins from Iraq, confront people with the reality of war.

Bush's genius in fighting the war in Iraq is to completely disconnect the country from the fighting. I have no clue what it's like over there because we never see it. It goes on, but we don't hear about people dying. The government learned from Vietnam, and as a result, a war is being waged in secret, with no end. Besides the lives, the cost in dollars is absurd, I don't want my tax dollars being spent to kill people.

George Bush's speech at the Republican convention tells you a lot about how he plays the game. Here's a telling excerpt:

THE PRESIDENT: "Wait a minute, wait a minute: To be fair, there are some things my opponent is for. (Laughter.) He's proposed more than two trillion dollars in new federal spending so far, and that's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts. (Applause.) And to pay for that spending, he's running on a platform of increasing taxes -- and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps. (Laughter.)

His tax -- his policies of tax and spend -- of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity -- are the policies of the past. We are on the path to the future -- and we're not turning back. "

George Bush criticizing someone for expanding government spending is where the laughter should have been. It's true that Bush isn't a tax and spend president, he's a spend and spend president, like a person maxing out his credit cards, he just doesn't care how much money's available, he's going to spend what he can and leave others to sort it out. The brilliance of this plan is that his democratic successor will get criticized for budget mismanagement, allowing the Republicans to take back the White House in the future and criticize Democratic excess.

The other telling thing is the way Bush and Conservatives completely control the word "liberal." They turned liberal into a dirty word, meaning wanton spending and government expansion, the exact thing that Bush is doing, except instead of spending on weapons, liberals spend on social programs. So, both parties spend, conservatives spend to kill people, liberals spend to help people. Right there's a soundbite Kerry should have been dropping, rather than skittering away from the liberal label, he should have reclaimed it, and redefined conservatism.

What Bush 9/11 Iraq linking tells us is that if you repeat something enough, people will believe it's true, and that's what Kerry needed to do about Bush and his crew. That's what they did with the flip flopper message, reinforce this one image of Kerry to the point that when you thought Kerry,, you thought flip flopper.

This is all aided by the "liberal media bias." By creating this perception that the media is against them, team Bush makes it difficult for any big news outlet to criticize them, because to speak out against Bush would be biased journalism. Considering how little journalistic investigation was put in to the buildup to Iraq, it's pretty clear that, if anything, there's a conservative bias in the media.

The culmination of this was the whole 60 Minutes incident, brilliantly played by the Republicans. The story here is that Bush was very negligent in his national guard service, yet the story became about how Rather didn't fully verify his evidence. So, a very valid point was nullified and turned into a positive for Bush. And then Bush gets defensive about people criticizing his military service, something that's completely ridiculous when you consider the way he attacked Kerry, someone who actually went to Vietnam, a place where you don't really have a choice whether you show up or not. And the same guy that shirked his own military service is sending thousands of people over to Iraq to die.

I wasn't really that surprised that Bush won, his team has reinvented politics and taken manipulation of the facts to another level. This is not a good level, but the Democrats were just embaressing out there, it was like watching Michael Jordan walk onto a neighborhood basketball court and take on whoever was around. That's how incompetent Kerry was, a guy who stood for nothing and couldn't even beat a president who'd made a ton of impeachable mistakes.

And Bush only got worse in his second term. The most notable mistake was in dealing with Katrina. He basically let a whole bunch of people die through inaction, it's really pathetic. And now, Bush is saying "Let's not play the blame game," this is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. It's like you discover a person's been murdered and say "Eh, he's already dead, so let's not try to find the murderer or anything, it won't bring him back." Yeah, it won't bring him back, but that's no reason to let a murderer go free. Holding someone accountable for their mistakes is not playing the blame game. This is the same tactic they pulled back with the recounts, making it sound like anyone who criticizes what they've done in the past is petty, backwards looking and missing the point. But, you've got to criticize what they've done in the past, because when it comes to future policies, they're going to make up whatever lie is needed to get things done.

It's been an awful presidency, one that's completely changed the way American politics are conducted. This is something the Democrats have to recognize when it comes time for the next election, they can't just sit back and get defined, they have to go out and control the terms of the debate.

Right now, it's looking like McCain will be running for the Republican nomination, and there'd be the temptation to say he won't be that bad, but this is a guy who was utterly destroyed by Bush in 2000, given one of the worst deconstructions I've seen, and then turned around and supported him. Most people say he was doing that to keep his status in the party, but if he's a guy who will compromise his values to do that, he's not someone who should be president. McCain is the opposite of Bush, he presents a really liberal, friendly facade, but ends up sticking with most of the conservative policies.

So, well played Bush. You've really been able to do whatever you want and get away with it. It's only going to be for history to judge the real extent of their crimes, but of course to do that would just be playing the blame game.

Education: Part II

So, last time, I discussed my vision for a new method of schooling. Now, I'm going to get in some of the issues surrounding it.

The problem with the write about what you want approach is the fact that whatever the school approves, students are not going to react against. So, even if they can write an essay about whatever they want, they'll still complain about the fact that they have to write an essay at all, and you'll still get the complaint that this has nothing to do with 'the real world.' And you'll also be getting a lot of complaints from parents, that students are missing out by not reading the classics. I'm not saying eliminate books from the curriculum, just expand out into films and graphic novels as well. We're not in a one medium time anymore, telling stories has moved beyond just the accepted books and theater

The other major problem is the fact that screening films in a 45 minute period is difficult. To really understand a film, you cannot watch it broken into chunks, that destroys all sense of pacing and momentum. So, I would say schools should offer mandatory additional screenings after school, so have class three days a week instead of five to make room for the screening. You could also try having students take out a DVD, but that would probably lead to a lot of people not watching the film, undermining the whole point of the initiative.

Obviously this whole plan is a bit centered on my interests and what I'd want from a school. I'm sure there's people out there who would say scrap English and get back to math and science at the core. I would argue that starting with high school, students should be broken into seperate math/science and English/history tracks, where you'd still get a bit of the other, but would primarily focus on your track. This way everyone can accelerate in their area and get more in depth, with the assumption that you actually want to learn about the stuff you're studying. This is much closer to college, where I take an occasional science course, but pretty much focus on film stuff, and it seems like high schools just want to be colleges, so it makes sense to emulate this model.

This would also alleviate some of the issues arising from a generalized acceleration track. Rather than creating a strict division between smart/'normal,' you'd end up with people doing what they're best in, and as a result somewhat evening the playing field. Obviously there's still discrepancy, but if you're in the English track, and aren't particularly strong in science, the science classes you take would be easier.

But what we'd probably see is people wanting to take the toughest courses in all subjects, either because they legitimately love learning, or more likely because they think that would look best on a college application. It's very difficult to create a new kind of curriculum because the need to teach AP courses means you're basically stuck to whatever they give you. Having gone to college, an AP course is nothing like a college course. You may learn roughly similar stuff, but the structure is so different, it's not at all comprable in terms of experience. So I would say remove APs and instead emulate a real college model and offer students more choice in terms of elective.

So, rather than have people learn general American history six times in twelve years, offer courses spotlighting specific chunks of history more in depth. And with English courses, you could do specifically targetted things, some focusing more on books, some on films and throw in a graphic novels course as well. I think that this would allow people to better develop their interests and engage more with the texts.

One of the biggest problems with my approach is it assumes that you have stuff you care about to begin with. If you're given the assignment to write whatever you want, you have to want to write about something, or else you're just back in the mode of getting assigned to do stuff. I'm someone who really likes writing, as evidenced by the fact that I'm writing this essay fro no apparent reason. However, I don't think most people really enjoy the act of writing, so even if they could write about their favorite thing, they wouldn't really enjoy it.

And then there's the fact that most people just don't care that passionately about things. I love films, so I make them, I did the film series at the library, backyard screenings, worked making a film, this summer was all about that. I'll call people and ask them to go see a film screening I set up, but I never get approached by other people for something they really care about. The closest thing to a passion most people have is for poker, and unless you really stretch it, I don't see an analytical essay coming out of a poker game.

So, perhaps a more targetted class system would allow people to better develop their interests. I think the other critical thing would be to not have a hierarchy, so don't offer Shakespeare as the class people 'should' take and then have film as a remedial type thing. It's got to be a total equality of the mediums.

However, even if administrators went for this, right now we've got a student population that's more concerned with getting into college than learning anything. That's what bothered me the most about high school, nobody really cared about the stuff we learned, they just wanted to get good grades and put stuff on their resume. I tried to 'keep it real,' and only do stuff that I actually enjoyed, nothing to just throw on the resume, and I pretty much succeeded. But going to a curriculum where learning is actually valued would likely upset the balance demanded by college admissions, and students are not going to endanger their chance to go to a good college just to learn something. And now at college I'm starting to hear more people worry about grades and grad school. I swear this was just happening, the past four years have gone by in a blur.

Bringing things to a close, one of the most striking things I remember about high school was towards the end I was hearing so many people say I wish I'd studied more, actually gone to class. At the end, they saw that there is merit in learning, but for a lot of them it was too late to really change things.

It's a strange time, high school, you spend your whole time there waiting to leave and once you leave, you can't help but lament not appreciating it while you were there. The experience you have at school is so much determined by the people in your classes and the teachers that it's impossible to institute a cure all curriculum, and what works for me might not work for other people.

I will say that things worked out well for me. Most of the science classes were extremely laid back, with a heavy emphasis on free periods to go on the computers, and that worked for me, it wasn't stuff I wanted to learn. My favorite classes were English classes, particularly senior year English, which is the closest to my fantasy curriculum. I got to write essays on pretty much whatever I wanted and there were some memorable learning related moments. In that class there were two assignments, one where you had to write about a song and one creative writing one where everyone got to share something of themselves with the class and there was a mutual respect in a critique of the pieces. I loved hearing peoples' creative writing pieces, the variety of subject matter and there was none of the usual not caring attitude, in that moment it was acceptable to be passionate about something and that's ultimatelly what life's about, finding something you're passionate and doing it.

So, if nothing else school should help people along that road, to find what they love to do and pursue it, so that you have a rewarding life. That's what school is really about, giving you the tools to learn for yourself.

Education: Part I

I was reading some posts on Barbelith, and there was a topic on what your ideal school curriculum would. I found the question really interesting. It's easy to complain about schools, everyone does and when I was in high school I certainly did, but it's a lot harder to come up with something that would actually work. But I'm going to give it a try, to find something that would work within the realities of student lifein high school.

The first thing to consider in assessing school is the fact that students are not going to want to do work. No one wants to be there, even if they do, it's basically required to feign disdain for even the least bit of work that is requested. So you're working with a problematic situation because the students' goal is to just pass the time as quickly and effortlessly as possible. That means if you give them the opportunity to 'explore freely,' they're likely to end up just doing nothing.

I think the biggest problem with school is that it puts you off learning. School is bad, you learn at school, therefore learning is bad. For a long time I held this belief too, the idea that analyzing a book, like we would in class, was reading too much into it. Frequently I'd hear people question an assertion by wondering whether that was the author's intention. Was something created as a symbol or was it just coincidence, and if the author didn't intend it, then why are we bothering to talk about it?

I think the biggest change for me was when I read Watchmen, and for the first time I saw a work that required using literary techniques to analyze it. You couldn't really understand the work without the understanding of foils, juxtaposition, metaphor, etc. It's a work that demands to be analyzed, to be deconstructed and unraveled. And so for the first time, I had to move from passive absorber mode to active explorer when it came to approaching a work of fiction, and that meant that I was doing the same things I did in class on my own time, and suddenly, doing them in class didn't seem so ridiculous. This was followed a couple of years later by The Invisibles, which broke me out of this idea that a symbol is only valid if the author consciously inserts it into the work, The Invisibles showed that the greatest books essentially write themselves, with the symbolism arising organically out of the work itself, rather than through specific choices by the author.

So, this experience I had forced me to reevaluate the kneejerk student reaction that whatever we're doing in class is stupid. That brings up the question, if people have to discover this themselves, how can we expect to teach them? I know a lot of people still refuse to engage with a film beyond the mere act of viewing it, and that likely stems from the fact that school experience makes people associate analysis with work, and in their free time, they don't want to work.

The other problem with English classes is the fact that so few people actually read the works that are discussed and written about in class. I always tried to read the whole book, but there were times when I'd do a skim and then take a look over the Cliff Notes to make sure I got the point. If you consider the fact that your average person might read a Shakespeare play and not understand it any better than they would if they looked through the Cliff Notes, it makes sense why people don't bother to read. But at the same time this means that the class becomes increasingly removed from the text itself and becomes more about repeating the same few ideas, an enaction of a tired ritual instead of a live engagement with a fresh text.

So, what would it take to make people actually read? I would suggest starting to mix in study of films with books in English classes, so that people would be able to write about something that they actually know about. You could give people a great book, but still some of them aren't going to read it because schooling creates an aversion to reading. That's a big problem for later in life, but putting that aside, people usually enjoy watching movies, so it would make sense to educate them through something they enjoy.

Some movies are shown in class, but it's usually the movie of a book you've already read, and then it gets evaluated in relation to the book, not as an art object in and of itself. Or a film is used to illustrate a historical event. This use of film reinforces the idea that the medium is somehow inferior, the only films worthwhile are ones that are based off something that is already acccepted into the academic canon.

I would move to a split books/films English class, where the films are challenging original works that have all the thematic complexity of the books that are read. Shakespeare's stuff was the popular fiction of his time, so there's no harm in having people learn from something they actually like. The problem then becomes, which films would you show? The initial leaning would be to go for something old, probably a European art film from the 50s, films that are inherently artistic, and also aren't popular fiction. This would be a way to avoid the complaints that would arise if you started showing people popular films. People would think the film has to be something you wouldn't want to see, or else it's not really learning.

The primary reason you read books in English classes is to provide the material to write about. I consider writing the most important skill you learn in high school, it's got the most real world relevance, and it's also the thing you're going to use most at college, regardless of what major you do. So, even though I'm a film major, most of my assignments are still writing essays, just about films instead of books. Even if you're a science major, you're still going to write stuff, so students need to learn how to write, and unfortunately, the fact that they don't actually read the books they're writing about means that composing essays is seen largely as 'bullshitting' enough to fill the page requirement. It's this association of the analytical process with 'bullshit' that's disturbing, and is something I see a lot in college students. There's the implication that reading deeply into something is inherently ridiculous, and that a work is primarily surface.

So, using films in the classroom and then having students analyze them in written assignments would hopefully be a way to get people comfortable with the process of analytical thought. There wouldn't be the issue of not reading the book because everyone would see the same film. What sort of films would I use? Because you're approaching from a narrative perspective, the actual film techniques used should primarily be those with literary antecedents. One film I'd consider ideal would be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yes, there'd be a lot of chuckles about the drug association, and I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't understand it, but it's a film so symbolic that you have to read into it. So, assigning people to discuss the meaning of the film, as they see it would be an ideal chance for people to analyze a text in their own way.

Another film that would be great would be In the Mood for Love/2046, films rich with symbolism, parallels and literary technique. These would be films that would challenge people, but also hopefullly be enjoyable and give them a lifelong appreciation for qulaity films. Antoher great duo to analyze would be Before Sunrise/Before Sunset.

As I mentioned before, one of the biggest problems with having kids read in school is that it creates this lifelong association between books and school, leading people to view books as bad, or reading as something they 'should do,' not something they'd want to do. By the time you get to school, film is already ingrained as something entertaining, so in theory, these classes would make people take what they already do, but approach it from a more literary perspective.

Now, would this work in reality? You'd have to choose the films carefully, or else people would build up a wall between the films shown in class and the films they watch for entertainment, to the point that they would consider them almost seperate mediums and zone out from those films in the same way they do the books people already read in class. I think a good opening exercise would be to take a really popular, accessible film, perhaps even one chosen by the class, and then read into it, to show that the techniques used in class can be used on any film, any piece of fiction.

That's one of the keys in this revamp of schools. It is learning the act of analysis that's most important, not that what people are analyzing be within the accepted canon of literary material. In high school, I would enjoy writing essays when I could do it on a topic of my choice. So, I wrote about all my favorite stuff over the course of the four years: Star Wars, Batman Returns, Ghost World, Pink Floyd, Philip K. Dick, Tim Burton, Blade Runner, The Invisibles, Watchmen, Brazil and more. When I got a chance to do an essay on whatever I wanted, I put more effort in and took the time to really make it good, whereas an essay on a book I didn't really care about I'd just write quickly to get it done. On the AP English exam, I wrote an essay on The Invisibles and got a 5, so it's not what you write about, but how you make your point that matters.

So in theory, if you were to give students carte blanche to write on whatever they want, they'd put more effort into the essays. So, you could have people write about rap lyrics, videogames, whatever, as long as they put an effort into legitimately analyzing that which they choose to write about. In an urban school, are people really going to read Hamlet? No, but maybe use Tupac's poetry in the course and you'll get people more interested. Going down this path, you get into the problem of the middle aged teacher seemingly trying to act hip by teaching what 'the kids today' like, and also having to do additional reading to evaluate the quality of assignments.

So, that's the basic idea. In the next part I'll cover some of the issues, and also discuss how math/science fit into things.

So, there was an election

George Bush got reelected, which annoys me. It implies that the vast majority of people out there in the middle of the country completely ignored what he did as president and voted for him because he’s religious, and has “moral values.” He’s reactionary and the president should be guiding us into a new age, a better age, and Bush is only bringing us down. Humanity’s destiny is the stars, both literal, as in space, and metaphorical, as in the upper reaches of our mind. Bush is only pulling us down, trapping us in thousand year old conflicts, and not allowing science to move forward. Not that Kerry would have been a great leader necessarily, it’s just he wouldn’t get us embroiled in an unnecessary war, like Iraq. George Bush has a vision for the country, but it’s an awful vision, I want a president with a vision of a better country and a better world, not through fighting, but through the spreading of love and knowledge.

However, the whole thing seems impersonal and removed from me. History makes it easy to see trends, but when you’re living something, you don’t really become aware of how things work until you look at it in retrospect. A better world is easily within reach, and hopefully this is just a momentary step back before an explosion into a new world of higher consciousness. This division in the country recalls The Invisibles. Bush is essentially an archon, he’s a force for stagnation and violence. He’s not evil, just misguided. What his policies are doing is preventing us from moving forward because we’re caught up in this war in Iraq, and trying to curb the momentum of freedom in social issues. But what his presidency has done is create a whole group of people who are so disgusted by him that they have become active in trying to change things, overthrow the archons and make a better world. What the invisibles are trying to do is change the world and make it better, more forward thinking. It’s essentially a dichotomy between fear and hope, the conservatives fear a new world, while progressives are hoping to build a new and better world.

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