Author: John Grant

 
In this town, money talks and bullshit walks.
-PA Rep. Ozzie Myers on his Abscam tape
 
 
Political sports scorekeeper Chris Matthews recently predicted American Hustle would become a classic film of American politics of the order of Citizen Kane. I’d add All the King’s Men and All the President’s Men.

What’s so wonderful about American Hustle is that it’s very serious at the same time that it has great fun with a contemporary political system dominated by the archetype of the aggressive prosecutor. While a servant of the state, he or she ruthlessly advances a career by bringing down others. Dishonesty and the entrapping scam are major tools of the trade.

With Chris Christie, the whole smelly system has narratively come full circle. An aggressive federal prosecutor with eyes on the White House is suddenly the hunted prey of other hungry prosecutors looking for a career boost. The attorney credited with getting the goods to put away Governor Blagojevic in Illinois has been hired to go for Christie.

Who’s scammin’ whom? Having fun at the public opening of a renovated historic Jersey building.

While American Hustle may be based on the late seventies Abscam scandal, it’s more art than journalism or history. “Some of this actually happened,” we’re told on screen up front. Like all good fiction based on reality, the art is in finding a deeper truth. In this case, writer Eric Warren Singer and writer/director David O. Russell have changed the names to make it work in a mythic mind space. Great acting enriches a great script. (In the photo above, left to right, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Jenner, Christian Bale and Jennifer Lawrence.)

US military history from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan is too often a combination of destructive stumbling around followed by an effort to sustain and project forward the notion of US power and exceptionalism. To forge another narrative is very difficult.

There’s the blind rush to war to put in its place some faction halfway around the world that has not played ball with US leaders. Next, there’s the moment military leaders realize they must fend off a local opposition they had not anticipated. Finally, there’s the inevitable condition of weariness over the killing, dying and destruction, leading to a withdrawal once that can be managed in a face-saving manner that sustains the delusion that the whole enterprise was honorable.

I made two trips to Iraq, one in December 2003, and another the following month, January 2004. Both entailed hair-raising 12-hour back-and-forth dashes across the Anbar desert in a large SUV sometimes doing 110 MPH from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. This was at the moment US military commanders realized, shock and awe aside, its invasion/occupation had flushed out a formidable resistance movement.

Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Marines in the second and bloodiest attack on Falluja
 

In December 2003, I visited Falluja with two Iraqis and another American in a blue Opal with a cracked windshield. We were going to link up my American colleague with his son at a forward base in Falluja. It was quite an adventure finding the base. In the process I learned that Falluja — contrary to the identity it now has in the US as a famous battle — was a lake resort known for its delicious kabob restaurants. Our Iraqi guide was a bit of a comedian and insisted that we would end the day with a visit to a famous kabob restaurant in downtown Falluja.

“Uhh, is that wise?” I asked. The guide who was a professor of cinema at a Baghdad university winked at me but kept up the joke for the more anxious American father in the front seat.

“No problem! They are delicious. You will love the kabobs of Falluja.”

My second visit to Baghdad was with David Goodman, a documentary filmmaker. We went to meet with this same cinema professor to ponder cultural exchange. Goodman and I were hoping to return to Baghdad to teach a class. Then, all our plans went up in smoke when several American military contractors were ambushed in Falluja and their charred bodies hung ignominiously from a bridge. This provoked the first, Army assault on Falluja. There was to be no cinema class featuring an American Academy Award winning director and his Sancho Panza sidekick. The resistance had grown and the price on American heads was too much.

The issue of economic equity is appearing on the national agenda. We’re suddenly hearing lots of talk about raising the minimum wage and other reforms to break the cycle of social Darwinism and provide working people at least a livable wage for their labor.

As a political activist, I’m impressed with how issues like these play out in the cultural realm where narrative and storytelling play a powerful role in forming the political consensus for reform in a globalized world.

I’m particularly interested in the genre of noir crime fiction. In our hi-tech, distraction-based culture, it’s arguably the rule that to get ahead one must break rules. Foolish losers follow the rules. Writing on Brazilian culture in Brazil On the Rise, Larry Rohter talks about a tradition there where laws are seen as not applying to the powerful; laws are, instead, used by the powerful against their enemies. A similar, more Anglo Saxon climate of corruption plays out in our North American capitalist world. The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Money drives elections and justice itself.

There’s no better overarching narrative structure to address this than the genre of crime fiction, especially what is known as noir, a genre the crime fiction maven Otto Penzler, publisher and owner of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York, says is classically about desperate “losers” struggling to get somewhere in a harsh world.

There’s a movement in Philadelphia to resurrect the pulp fiction novels of David Goodis from the 1950s that emphasize ordinary working class protagonists in an essentially lawless, rough underworld in Philly. Utilizing art and entertainment, stories like this ennoble the struggle of ordinary working people.

The 1953 pulp novel's cover and a scene from Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1983 film of The Moon in the Gutter
 

The Moon in the Gutter, Goodis’ 1953 classic is a wonderful pulpy noir about the realities of class in a working class river ward of Philadelphia. The plot revolves around stevedore Bill Kerrigan, a beefy, working man struggling with life at the bottom and the effort to retain some dignity. While not all “Marxist,” the novel is about the collision of class, specifically involving “slummers,” well-off, uptown people who like to drown their sorrows or walk on the wild side in a poor working class neighborhood along the Delaware River. Much of the drama takes place in a bar called Dugan’s Den, “the kind of room where every time piece seemed to run slower,” where a double shot of rotgut rye cost twenty cents. “At Dugan’s there was little interest in time. They came here to forget about time.”

It’s that time of the year again. Ho. Ho. Ho. There’s the urge to celebrate the Winter Solstice (AKA Christmas) with family and friends. It’s also time for end-of-the-year assessments concerning the absurdities of life in a fading empire in denial.

To a responsible American leftist who feels as American as apple pie, the absurdities can be especially pronounced this time of year, given the socially-progressive politics people like me advocate is on the mat and the ref is counting. The pie is getting smaller. And the Social Darwinists are fat and getting hungrier ever day.

The Emperor gives his first press conference
 

In this spirit of Holiday absurdity and frustration, I’m cutting loose. I’m going to just pretend I’m the most ruthless Emperor ever to sit in the cockpit of state of this absurd 21st Century Imperium I’m calling The Corporate and Imperial States of America — C.I.S.A. for short. I sit on a throne made by a homeless designer out of a dozen broken parts from a dozen pieces of thrift shop furniture. A line of correspondents waits to ask me a question. (We’ve cut off Fox News until they learn better how to grovel for access in this new regime.) The correspondent from MSNBC asks the first question. In fact, it’s the only question we’ve allowed this afternoon:

“What are the first ten things you’re going to do?”

1) First we will be releasing Bradley/Chelsea Manning and dropping any legal actions against Julian Assange. We are announcing an amnesty program for Edward Snowden, who will, if he accepts, become a consultant as part of a major re-vamping of the entire US intelligence system. Yes, heads will have to roll. Like they say, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. While we don’t want to throw anybody’s baby out with the bathwater, we may have to throw somebody’s baby out — for the good of the larger whole. It will not be without some bumps, and my newly formed People’s Guard is ready to monopolize on any violence that breaks out. We support the Second Amendment, and all over the country we are establishing and training chapters of a well-armed militia known as the Smedley Butler Brigades made up of disgruntled unionists, the unemployed and the homeless. These are things that have to be done. We are not allowing change to be quashed any longer. The status quo ends here.

 
Lara Logan is a formidable TV reporter who has covered wars and other stories at significant risk. She’s supremely confident and has a powerful journalistic institution supporting her. But as a would-be ethical journalist, she seems to rely too much on her sexual allure and to be too tight with elite elements of the US military establishment.

When it comes to TV reporters, the 42-year-old Logan’s persona epitomizes the pop adjective hot. She’s a beautiful South African blonde with a come-hither sultry voice. It’s noteworthy that she’s married to a US civilian defense contractor from Texas she met covering the war in Afghanistan. They have two young kids. She made her aggressive militarist credentials clear in a 2012 speech in which she unambiguously called for vengeance by US “clandestine warriors” following the Benghazi attack.

As a journalist, Logan always seems to be falling off Albert Camus’ famous ridgeline separating the two abysses of Frivolous Art and Propaganda. In her case, the Propaganda abyss she’s falling into involves her breathy, seductive adoration of male “warriors” and adventurers she is inclined to report on and interview.

Lara Logan, her interview with Morgan Jones (really Dylan Davies), his book and Benghazi burning

The dust-up over her October 27th 60 Minutes interview with a macho warrior cum bullshit artist about his fantasy heroics in Benghazi makes her sexy style a fair issue for discussion. Her story was timed perfectly and played right into the hands of men like California Rep. Darrel Issa, Senator Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity and other right-wing elements doing their mightiest to undermine the Obama administration.

It’s not that President Obama’s Libya actions don’t deserve fair criticism; it’s that Lara Logan’s story featuring “security officer” Dylan Davies (using the pseudonym Morgan Jones) posturing as a brave clandestine war hero turned out to be pandering, right wing militarist garbage. Even Fox News was leery of Davies and washed their hands of the man. Finally, Davies as Morgan Jones had produced a ghost-written book called The Embassy House published by Threshold Editions, a right wing imprint owned by Simon and Schuster, which is owned by Lara Logan’s boss, CBS, something she failed to mention in her interview.

President Obama finds himself under fire on two disparate fronts these days, both for the botched rollout of his signature health care program and for the secret spying on allied heads of state.
– Peter Baker, The New York Times
 
It’s one of those elegant solutions to a mix of problems where you wonder why no one thought of it before.

President Obama is under assault for two very tricky problems. The first is the so-far ineffective communication program for the Affordable Care Act, a key component to the administration’s goal to improve the delivery of health care to all Americans.

The second problem is that the National Security Agency has been listening very aggressively (and very competently) to the cell phone calls and emails of people like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The NSA has been doing this to Merkel for the past 11 years, which includes the entire five years of the Obama presidency. Ms Merkel and others are now quite exercised and perturbed.

Thanks to the talented Edward Snowden we now know how effective the NSA has been in figuring out how to track and listen in on the phone calls and emails of world leaders, as well as ordinary Americans. Of course, we’re told, the NSA only monitors US citizen calls if we dial a potential foreign al Qaeda agent. The NSA’s credibility is such that the reaction to that has been a resounding: “Yeh, sure!” Still, you have to admit, it’s pretty incredible what they are able to do. Personally, I’m still awed by landline telephones and that our voices somehow travel with hundreds of other voices over wire or clear cable as laser light. But even that’s like two Campbell soup cans and a wire when it comes to the marvels of the 21st century technological communication skills harnessed by the NSA.

The Obama administration and the NSA are now acting like kids pointing their stubby little fingers at each other. “Gee, I didn’t know that was going on,” the president said. “Oh yeh? Well, we told your people what we were doing. If they didn’t tell you, that’s your problem,” the nation’s spy chiefs replied.

US chief spy General James E. Clapper, Edward Snowden and a common listening device

Top spy James E. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, conceded the President of the United States could not know everything, although reports on the NSA would suggest General Clapper was trying to reach that goal himself. It’s important to understand that the 66-year-old leviathan Clapper oversees does not shift with the political winds every four or eight years. The leadership of the NSA (and the CIA and the Pentagon, for that matter) does not have to kiss American voter ass to get re-elected. They operate on an inexorably rising through-line that began with the super confidence of the immediate post-World War Two moment and the Cold War infused fear of losing that dominant top-dog feeling. Accordingly, our intelligence matrix has been able to grow steadily, mostly in secret, since the current National Security State was officially enacted in 1947 and the NSA was added to the intelligence-gathering mix in 1952.

“We’re talking about a huge enterprise here,” Clapper recently told a congressional hearing. Spy chiefs, of course, are notorious masters of understatement, and what he rules is actually much larger than “huge.” It’s mind-boggling. We poor citizen schmucks have only the minutest hint of what the hell it does — for us and to us.

To: Jofi Joseph, Washington DC

Dear Mr Joseph:

I read of your firing as a low-level national security adviser in the White House thanks to your “snarky” tweeting about various Obama administration officials above you in the pecking order.

I understand you are contrite and a bit embarrassed and said that your tweeting escapade as @NatSecWonk started as innocent fun and turned into something else. Even the New York Times reporters who told your story on their front page today seemed hard pressed not to treat it comically. The headline was: “White House Official’s Career Twitters Out.” Twittering out is hardly a dignified downfall. In the annals of schadenfreude over the downfall of promising national office holders via the internet, at least you did not tweet anyone images of your penis.

Jofi Joseph

From here on out I’m going to treat your situation seriously, since I feel your predicament is instructive. I know you and your wife certainly see it as serious, since she remains on the Washington national-security-state power merry-go-round.

On the Rachel Maddow Show Wednesday night, yours was not the only Twitter-based story. Maddow gave much more time to, and was quite laudatory about, a tweeter named Tom Matzzie, a man who once worked for MoveOn.org.

Mattzie made blow-by-blow tweets from a Washington to New York Acela train of a loud, off-the-record cell phone interview being given in the seat directly behind him. The interviewee, Michael Hayden, as you must know, was the NSA director under President Clinton and CIA director under Presidents Bush and Obama; he now works for the Chertoff Group, which according to its website, “provides business and government leaders with the same kind of high-level, strategic thinking and diligent execution that have kept the American homeland and its people safe since 9/11.”

When Hayden was informed via his cell phone that an ordinary schmuck had just done a surveillance job on him from the seat ahead, the master spy introduced himself and graciously posed with Matzzie for a photograph. As any good spy knows, it’s important to always remain cool and make the best of things when caught with your pants down. (The photo is at the end of this missive.)

For the past week I’ve been talking with anyone I could shoehorn about the shooting death of Miriam Carey on the streets of Washington DC. As with any homicide — and that’s how it would be classified for the autopsy — there are differing opinions and mitigating circumstances to consider.

For instance, the mitigating circumstance most articulated by officialdom and the media to justify the killing of Miriam Carey is that the threat of terrorism is in the forefront of the minds of police officers in the nation’s capital, where 17 days earlier a random gunman had murdered 12 people at the Navy Yard.

Miriam Carey

In the case of Miriam Carey, 34, the consensus seems to be her killing was a tragedy in which police officers were justified in killing her. They were, accordingly, honored on the floor of Congress for doing their duty during a time of great national stress aggravated by an unprecedented shutdown of the federal government. The capital police officers who killed Miriam Carey were working without pay. The media news cycle has moved on, and the government shutdown remains the big story.

John Constantino on fire on the Washington Mall; his last words were about "voting rights"

Likewise, we didn’t hear much about John Constantino. The day after Miriam Carey’s killing, the 64-year-old Mount Laurel, New Jersey, man, also an African American, drove to the capital city, and at about 4:30 in the afternoon, on the mall between the Air & Space Museum and the National Gallery, sat down on the grass facing the Capitol building, poured gasoline all over himself and set himself ablaze. Witnesses reported he said something about “voters’ rights” or “voting rights.” The married father of three grown children died later in the hospital. A lawyer hired by Constanino’s family said his act was not political and that he was mentally ill.

Constantino’s neighbor, Joe Horner, told a different story to a New York Daily News reporter. Constantino, Horner said, “didn’t like the government for some reason. … He said to me, ‘They’re no good. They don’t look out for us and they don’t care about anything but their own pockets.’ ”

 
Watching the White House squirm over the on-going massacres in Egypt one doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or resort to the vaudevillian method and throw rotten vegetables at them.

President Obama’s “condemnation” of the Egyptian military’s massacre of civilians sounded like obligatory ass-covering. Then there was the slippery boiler-plate verbiage spouted by the White House’s new spokesman with the wonderfully apropos name of Josh Earnest. I wouldn’t josh you, that’s his name. And trust me, he’s the personification of earnestness.

The sense of absurdity in the air takes one back to the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and his “credibility gap,” which now seems like child’s play. Incredibly, even John McCain has a more critical analysis of the Egyptian coup.

Josh Earnest, John Kerry and Barack Obama

It’s a real low point in the Obama presidency. They no doubt have the capacity to go lower, but the President golfing and cocktail partying with rich corporate donors on Martha’s Vineyard while the Egyptian military shoots over 1000 citizens to death in the street is pretty bad.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry has been shuttling around the world trying to make everyone believe night is day and, somehow, a deal between a settlement-focused Israel and a sovereign Palestine is possible. These days Kerry sounds like the man who ate the canary spouting optimistic sound bites as he spits out little yellow pin feathers.

Every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew.

-Paul Radin
 

 

America 2013 is a far cry from the days of Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) and even the days of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. It’s a brave new world 30 years beyond Orwell’s imagined dystopia 1984 .

While we may have had the cathode ray tube then, the technology of the 1960s and 1970s had more in common with the slowness of media in the 18th century than it does with today’s media/surveillance reality. Daniel Ellsberg could not have imagined the internet and that a war could be entirely managed and operated within the confines of an alternate cyber universe. One of the first visions of today’s internet reality was notably published in 1984: William Gibson’s sci-fi classic Neuromancer.

Within this mind-boggling, ever-growing maze, it’s interesting to inject the time-honored archetype of the trickster, famous as edgy and playful figures in Norse and Native American myth. Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, puts it this way: “If the confidence man is one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers, then instead of saying there are no modern tricksters one could argue the opposite: trickster is everywhere.” Caveat emptor — buyer beware.

We’re now told any technology operating with a computer chip can be hacked into and controlled from a remote spot — including cars. My reaction to that is: You gotta be kidding! We’re also informed there exists 300 types of drones, which are flying robots able to do things most of us can’t even imagine. Our soldiers (oops, I mean warriors) will soon be equipped with on-board computer glasses linked to command and intelligence support elements — that is, they’ll be armed humans a hiccup away from the cyborgs of science fiction.

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A smart young veteran who had the identical job as Bradley Manning in Iraq once told me — a tech-ignorant, flesh-and-blood Vietnam veteran — the entire war in Iraq was recorded and tracked in cyberspace on the internet. “The whole war is secret!” he told me with an amazed chuckle.

It’s clear to many Americans the combination of post-911 fear, the militarization of sophisticated technology and a runaway regime of secrecy has led to a dangerous condition of permanent war in which our military is outrunning the capacity for responsible democratic decision-making. As outgoing President Eisenhower warned in 1961, the Military-Industrial Complex is now running the show, and the idea of citizen-based democracy is a feel-good myth incessantly flogged with the tools of Public Relations. Real democracy cannot exist in such a context.

The fact is, our military and its powerful civilian supporters deal with the American public and the rest of the world in two very distinct modes: Secrecy or Public Relations. Serious journalists and their critical sources — ie. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden — work the no-man’s-land between these two distinct modes. We have now reached the point the government is seriously gunning for those working in this no-man’s-land.