|
|
|
“A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS” Friday, the ninth of July began pleasantly. I awakened and eventually slouched into my study to download the morning’s emails. Among them, I found a fragment of Gerontion, by T. S. Eliot. It was a collage of images so compelling that it drove me to read the entire piece the first thing that morning. I had not visited the poem since my college days in Carolina. Thoughts were swirling through my mind as I anticipated the day’s events. I was bound for London to see the most talked-about film in years, Fahrenheit 911 by Michael Moore. Today, the film would premiere in Britain, and the Democrats Abroad arranged a special screening at a famous cinema, The Screen on the Hill, in London’s blissful Belsize Park. After replying to a few of my emails, I took the train to Paddington. On a glorious day filled with bright July sunshine, I crossed Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square on my way to a few of my favorite book shops on Charing Cross Road. In the afternoon, I had lunch at my favorite café, Food for Thought, near Covent Garden, and after more book browsing, I caught the Edgeware train to Belsize Park. The Screen on the Hill was beginning to come to life in anticipation of the dramatic events that would unfold most unexpectedly over the next few hours. In the lobby I bumped into Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who writes powerful letters to The Independent condemning the neoconservative policies of the Bush and Blair administrations. Dawkins and I agree entirely on political topics in general and neoconservativism in particular. We believe that the Bush administration is a dangerous anomaly in world history, and that Tony Blair has been a fool to follow the neoconservative agenda. Having attended many of Dawkins’ lectures and met him at private parties in Oxford, I was delighted to learn that the organizers had invited him to make some comments after the film. We exchanged a few words about mutual friends in Oxford, and then we made our separate ways to our respective seats. I was comfortably ensconced on the third row aisle when the shade of T. S. Eliot settled down beside me and whispered quietly in my ear,
Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see
a sign" The lines of Eliot’s eloquent lamentation echoed concavely in my inner ear as the film began. The opening scene showed Al Gore in Florida at the end of his 2000 campaign for the White House. Flanked by Ben Affleck and Robert De Niro, Gore made a heroic effort to carry this crucial state. Moving through the rape of the election that ensued, Moore revealed the treachery of the Bush family in the fixing, the rigging and the stealing of the presidential election, and he did it with nuance, with introspection, with logical analysis and, given what had happened, with a huge proportion of calculated restraint. The most riveting images from this opening sequence were those that were least familiar. Not the smirking faces of George and Jeb Bush, nor the grimaces of their robotic co-conspirator and culprit in the vote fraud - that “wicked witch” of the Republican right, Katherine Harris, nor the laughable comment of their official cadre who intoned the dubious plea, “This legitimacy issue has been overplayed,” or words to that appalling effect. No, the most riveting images were of the Afro-American and Asian-American congresswomen and men of The Black Caucus who solemnly filed their complaints with the Chairman of the Joint Session of Congress to protest the blatantly fraudulent election. Kafkaesque, the person presiding over this charade was none other than Al Gore, he who had been elected to serve as President of the United States of America, but who was now serving in his capacity as Vice President to chair the joint session of Congress in order to confirm the votes of the Electoral College and to hand power to America’s most notorious political crime family. Minority congressmen and women after minority congresswomen and men appealed to the Chair to hear their complaints against the political crimes in Florida and the Supreme Court. To each one in their turn, Gore intoned the following question, “Is your complaint signed by a member of the Senate?” Each time, they responded, “No, it is not.” It was during this arresting series of pleas that I realized something that had not occurred to me before. The reason that it had not occurred to me was simply due to the fact that this event had never been reported adequately in the media. The Democrats in the Senate had acquiesced far too easily and too swiftly to the Bush family’s political crimes in Florida and before the Supreme Court. Why did the Democrats in the Senate fail to protest this lamentable atrocity that will forever stain the fabric of American history? Why did they stand silent – to a man? Why did Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader of the Senate, remain passsive? Why did Ted Kennedy refuse to respond? Why did the Democratic Senator of Florida, Bob Graham, maintain silence? Why did Joe Lieberman, who had stood by Al Gore as his running mate, sit on his hands and swallow his pride as he watched the perversion of American democracy fall perfectly into place? Why did John Edwards of North Carolina, who is certainly no friend of the Bushes, why did he chose to allow the Republicans to take over the engines of power in America without uttering one word of official protest? Why did Senator John Kerry refrain from his commitment to protect and defend our democracy? Why did this seeming bastion of strength, character and integrity flinch in the face of American democracy’s greatest challenge? Why did all of them fail at this crucial moment in American history? Why? We can understand why the Republicans connived in the Bush illicit grabbing of power; but we cannot understand the silent acquiescence of the Senate Democrats. There is little wonder why so many people have so few compliments for the Democratic Party these days, and why so many are calling for the reclamation of the Party, which they deem, by omission and/or commission, has fallen into the hands of the political enemies of democracy. Michael Moore drove home his message of Democratic disarray in a masterful and tightly restrained sequence of images of fragile, vulnerable and aging women and men, who refused to be intimidated by the awesome pomposity arrayed in waves and phalanxes of raw and unadulterated political power pullulating directly in front and in back of them. These brave and wise representatives cast their lots against the monolithic power structure and they spoke with the oracular resonances of the Sibyls, the most elite, the most eloquent and the most respected women in ancient Rome. Kafkaesque to the marrow, this unforgettably dramatic sequence of images came to an end when Al Gore reminded the wronged these several representatives of the people that the rules of Congress had to be obeyed -- a remark that brought a gust of relief that shuddered through the chamber as the Republicans in the audience laughed and chuckled and smirked in unison at Gore’s final surrender to their brazen political will. T. S. Eliot leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Do not call on the Senate in a crisis! Oh, no, please do not disturb the Senators! That concept of Democratic senatorial dereliction of duty and flinching away in the face of evil was vividly driven home like a stake into the heart of America by Moore, and we should be grateful to him for that message and everything else that he has projected in his record-breaking film. Now opened and fully prepared for the onslaught of the film’s message, over the course of the next one hundred minutes I witnessed a phenomenon that is nothing less than the transformation of documentary cinema. Michael Moore has revolutionized the art of film. He has just displaced Oliver Stone as the most powerful and relevant producer of political moving images on our planet. By transforming the political film and transmuting it into documentary format, Moore has launched a cultural revolution that will necessarily move through its cascade of stages, bringing us into a new epoch in our political history. This might seem like a bold assertion, but I am only parroting the findings of the Tarantino Committee at the Cannes Film Festival, who awarded Fahrenheit 911 the prestigious Palme d’Or this May. Filmmakers know that Moore has created a masterpiece. His film will launch a new trend in cinema, and it will be a new documentary cinema predicated on political urgency. Already, filmmakers in Europe, Asia and Africa are moving in step with his lead. We shall soon see a succession of similar films documenting the crimes of our political leaders and revealing the impact of their atrocities on our fellow humans, suffering and reeling from the callous hatreds and stupidities of those who hold power. Moore’s film is a Niagara, a raging torrent of tormenting images. From the illegitimate inauguration of Bush, which was a repulsive spectacle, to the promptings of the first nine months of his corrupt presidency, Moore held his audience in rapt attention. His early approval ratings were the lowest in American history. In the summer of 2001, with the nation roiling in a sea of crises, Bush escaped the White House to take his now infamous long vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. There, the CIA briefed him with thick dossiers of documentation on the immediate threat posed by Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists who were planning to launch an imminent attack targeted directly at prominent landmarks on American soil. What did Bush do in response to these urgent intelligence briefings? How did he respond to this warning of real and present danger to his nation and his people? He forgot about it, then he picked up the nearest buzzsaw and began to saw through some trees gracing his property in Crawford. One fact is perfectly clear: His responsibilities at the White House and those to and for the American people come neither second, nor third, nor fourth, for they come not at all. His loyalties are to himself, his family and what he calls his “base”, the country’s gilded money elite. All of that revolting information came in polite and discrete cinematic bundles that built up sequentially into the storm of the message propelling, activating and empowering Moore’s film. The heart of the film revolves around 911. The image of Bush’s face in the Florida classroom as he retreated into a frozen stupor reading the story about the lost goat is etched indelibly into the collective memory of America and, now, the world. Bush was so clearly in the midst of a perplexing quandary, so deeply lost – or was it nonchalance?; so bemused by the information of horrific carnage, that he retreated into the warmth and security of the grade school classroom that must have seemed like a womb, encasing, nurturing and protecting him from the harsh reality that would soon plunge him violently into the maelstrom of 911. With a world in conflict being born, his own country under attack, he paused to read the children a story about a pet goat that had lost its way. With Bush on the screen, T. S. Eliot, whispered in my inner ear,
The goat coughs at night in the field
overhead;
I an old man, It was painfully clear: Bush is undeniably dull, and he is battered by powerful gusts in the windy spaces occupied by the presidency. If the film has any glaring shortcomings, I say that it is in the lack of attention to Bush’s mysterious odyssey on 911. He left Florida and flew out over the Atlantic. Then he stopped briefly at a southern military base before flying to a deep protective womblike bunker that was actually designed as a safe house for the military high command during a hypothetical nuclear war. Hours later, Bush emerged from his granite womb to be hurtled back to Washington. Moore selected some extremely powerful sequences to construct his indictment of the Bush dynasty. He produced images of Taliban ministers visiting America when they were negotiating with American oil companies for an oil pipeline while Bush was serving as Governor of the oil state. As late as March of 2001, the Taliban were still visiting Washington to negotiate directly with the Bush administration. One of the Taliban had an unpleasant exchange with a woman in the press corps, and he slandered her by denigrating her for being a woman. “I imagine that your husband has trouble with you,” the Taliban misogynist huffed at her as she politely asked him a question about human rights in Afghanistan. Moore also focused on George Bush, Sr.’s long history of suspicious business dealings with powerful Saudis. George Bush, Jr.’s associations with Saudis and their American minions started in a way at least as early as 1972 while he was in the Air National Guard, as revealed by a document Moore obtained through the FOIA, which named James Bath as a colleague. Eventually, the same James Bath would become the financial advisor to Salim Bin Laden, the principal heir to the Bin Laden dynasty and the eldest brother of Osama Bin Laden. Bush would receive a large investment from the Bin Ladens when he launched the first in his succession of unsuccessful oil companies in Texas. The Bush-Saudi business connections only began there. They proceed right up to the present day. The Bin Ladens invested huge sums into The Carlyle Group, a company that employed Bush, Sr., Bush, Jr. and their consigliore, James Baker III. Moore documented questionable profits for The Carlyle Group of over $230,000,000; profits that enhanced the coffers of both the Bin Laden and Bush dynasties. The other rampant business connections between the Bushes and the Saudis were equally damning. Two of Bush’s brothers, Neil and Marvin, have been engaged in lengthy negotiations with the Saudis, and they attempted to sell them a fabulously expensive pipeline to deliver oil more efficiently around their kingdom. There are a plethora of these cases that Moore did not cite, once again displaying a measured and restrained attack on the problems presented by the Bush family and their ill-advised dealings with the Bin Laden family and other Saudis in a long run up to 911. Moore included damning images of documents detailing the secret exodus of the Bin Ladens and scores of other Saudi Arabians in the immediate aftermath of 911 to open the charge that this ill-conceived escape was improperly orchestrated by the Bush administration. Official US investigators stated on camera that these Saudi Arabians and these Bin Ladens should have been debriefed by the FBI prior to their departures from America following 911. The audience clearly understood Moore’s message even if the FBI, CIA and Justice Department did not. This post-911 exodus of Saudis and Bin Ladens was perfectly suspicious, and the president’s family bears the onus of the apparent obstruction of American justice from investigating their longstanding business partners. Moore’s indictment on this count struck a resonant chord in the audience. Once again, there is a great deal more evidence that Moore did not cite in his prosecution of the Bush-Bin Laden-Saudi conspiracy to escape justice. For example, Moore did not make any mention of the resignation of John O’Neill, who had been the head of the FBI unit investigating Al Qaeda. Agent O’Neill resigned his post precisely because the Bush-Cheney administration had told him to keep his hands off the Saudis and the Bin Ladens. The White House obstructed Agent O’Neill’s access to channels of enquiry that he deemed essential to his investigation of the first bombing of the WTC, the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as well as the bombing of the USS Cole. Quite simply, the Bushes and the Cheneys had obstructed FBI Agent John O’Neill’s investigation of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Agent O’Neill resigned from the FBI in disgust, and he rebuked the Bush-Cheney administration for their obstruction of his probe into Al Qaeda. Then John O’Neill took the job of Chief of Security at the WTC. He reported for work on the 10th of September, 2001, and he conveniently (for the Bushes) died on 911. While Moore did not mention the case of John O’Neill, he did use damning footage of Richard Clarke’s trenchant condemnation of Bush for dereliction of duty leading to the massacre of the innocents on 911. Clarke is the intellectual equivalent of a piranha, and he lacerated and mutilated his prey vividly on the big screen. Clarke impaled Bush for seeking to incriminate Saddam Hussein for 911. Rounding the circle of criminal indictment, Moore focused his lenses on Hamid Karzai, Bush’s hand-picked puppet ruler of Afghanistan, and he informed us that prior to 911, Karzai and his top henchman worked for Unocal, the US oil firm that sought to construct a pipeline across Afghanistan. With images of the pipeline under construction, Moore’s case against the business conspiracy behind the war on terror was shockingly eloquent. Indeed, Moore’s calculated dexterity with logical documentation on film is tremendously impressive. Moving beyond the indictment of the Bush family, Moore focused on the human dimension of the violence that it has unleashed. He sought out the families of soldiers serving in Iraq from his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He revealed them in the depths of their grief, and he followed them to the White House where they poured out their wrath upon the symbol of their torment. More! He reeled off sickening footage taken in Iraq of horrific atrocities committed by American soldiers. Images of exploded human bodies, American soldiers confessing their roles in the killing of innocents, corpses of babies less than six months old piled into pickup trucks on top of a heap of other dead, mutilated and rotting cadavers – all innocent civilians, reeled past in a shocking succession of macabre moments frozen in time and in the memories of the audience. The film contained many more explosive revelations. Republican congressmen, who waved the flag bravely from the safety of their lavish homes who would not condescend to send any of their adult children to serve America in Iraq; the faces of Bush officials being made up for television appearances: Dick Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice; and Paul Wolfowitz with his disgusting saliva-as-hair-gel gesture -- now exposed to the scorn of the world; Bush teeing off while Americans suffered; Bush in an ill-fitting white tie and tailcoat pandering to his plutocratic base, and a constant stream of images that definitively skewered the Bush era for the horrible banquet of hypocrisy that it most certainly is. Subtle, compelling, austere, calculated, restrained and powerful – are a few of the terms that will be used to describe Moore’s film. After it was over, and the audience had experienced a transformation in their understanding of the paradoxes perplexing Bush’s America, Professor Richard Dawkins was introduced. Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist who writes powerful polemical letters for publication in British newspapers. He is an astute critic of the Bush and Blair administrations. After the showing of Fahrenheit 911, Dawkins delivered a short but resonant statement defining Bush and Blair as ignominious collaborators in one of America’s darkest eras. Dawkins praised John Kerry for his presidential demeanor and urged all in attendance to support his candidacy. He contrasted Kerry’s presidential aura with Bush’s ‘folksy charm’ which is a confusing concept for the European mind. “Folksy charm?” Dawkins intoned, “Folksy, yes, but charm?” The concept of a charming George W. Bush is simply something that will never compute in the mind of those who live outside of the United States of America. The man seems to be an obnoxious boor sans charm, sans manners, but undeniably folksy. That the American public could respect and empower a person on such a flimsy basis is a stunning riddle for the international community. Lamenting on the frustration of being a British subject, Dawkins exclaimed, “We have no one to vote for.” The audience appreciated Dawkins comment which struck a positive and sympathetic chord with the powerful messages of Moore’s film. Following Dawkins, a speaker named Dr. Gary Saymore was introduced. Dr. Saymore criticized Moore’s film for exaggerating the case against Bush. Dr. Saymore questioned Moore’s credibility and belittled his case against the ‘business’ arguments that underpinned much of Moore’s attack on Bush. Dr. Saymore said that Moore’s claims of Bush’s incompetence were apparently legitimate, but the claims about the business interests, i.e. the influence of: Enron, Unocal, The Carlyle Group and Halliburton could and should be dismissed as either irrelevant or illegitimate. Further, Saymore asked the audience to reject the concept that Bush’s war policies had any political motivation behind them. He recommended that the audience forget that Bush went from being one of the most unpopular presidents in history to one of the most popular overnight on 911. We were to forget that Bush’s war against Iraq had massive American popular support until little more than one year ago. In effect, Dr. Gary Saymore was proposing that Moore’s audience discount and erase from their memory banks fully two thirds of the film that they had just seen with their own eyes. T. S. Eliot whispered,
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Think now I agreed with Eliot. Dr. Saymore’s tortured argument might seem like a curious message to present to an audience of Democrats Abroad eagerly gathered to see Fahrenheit 911, but his talk would have been entirely appropriate for a meeting of Republicans Abroad who had gathered to see and to criticize the same film. From our perspective, Dr. Saymore had just served up a huge, unattractive and uninspiring platter of low grade balderdash. As I walked out of the Screen on the Hill and into the Rat & the Parrot Pub nearby, T. S. Eliot whispered,
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he
devours. Think at last The day after this astonishing incident, I googled Dr. Gary Saymore and read that he had fanned the flames of urgency for Bush’s war that set the stage for the false claims of Saddam’s nuclear program two years ago in the run up to Bush’s State of the Union address, when the president referred to the fictitious intelligence that the Iraqis had sought to buy uranium from Niger for their nuclear weapons program. In September of 2002, Dr. Gary Saymore had alarmed the world when he warned us that if Saddam were to acquire nuclear material from a foreign source, he could develop an Iraqi bomb much more quickly than if he were to develop his own domestic nuclear industry first. The forged Niger documents circulated through London gathered momentum in the context of the Saymore pronouncements, and the Bush administration quickened the drumbeats in the run up to the war. It is a matter of public record that Dr. Saymore played a public role in the global failure of our intelligence organizations. If this presidential election campaign is to be won, and Bush is to be defeated, it will be the victory of the rank and file members of the Democratic Party and the new plethora of organizations like Moveon, Common Cause, Truth.out and Democracy for America that will lead the way. With these ideas running through my brain as I boarded the First Class Cabin bound for Oxford, I noticed that T. S. Eliot had not left my side. He looked directly at me and intoned,
These with a thousand small deliberations
We are now moving forward through a mysterious wilderness of mirrors, but that is very familiar ground for those of us who began our political journey in postwar America and believed in the tenets of democracy, freedom and justice. We shall now erect our own wilderness of mirrors and rearrange the paradoxes in history that crystallize our wills for political change.
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
