Category: World at Large

But what about the politics of cynicism and misanthropy?


As it turns out, I was able to make it to the John Edwards event on campus this morning, and, all in all, I’d give him a B+. He both read and rushed through the first half of his remarks, which involved some new formulation of his trade policy (more on that in a second), and I found his opening lines particularly ham-handed and speechwriterly. “I know y’all have been waiting for a Son of the South to come to NYC…A-Rod,” he said (and I’m paraphrasing.) “Well, I’m not A-Rod, but Wisconsin proved one thing: I can close!” Um, ok, but A-Rod is a shortstop and all, not a closer.

Anyway, nitpicking aside, Edwards improved measurably once he put the paper down and got into the rhythm of his “Two Americas” stump speech, which he’d clearly delivered many times. There were moments, however, when he definitely could have embellished his standard schtick, given the crowd. Edwards talked about how he was a lonely, legal David often going up and winning cases against a Goliath-sized team of corporate lawyers, a biographical stat which probably plays great in the Heartland. It went flat here, though, perhaps because the many law students in the auditorium seemed confused by his remarks: But we want to be those well-paid corporate shills!

Still, Edwards came off extremely polished and personable, and he definitely got the crowd on his side, even when he was blindsided by a sneak “Campaign on AIDS!” protest on the dais behind him. Several members of the VIP crowd unveiled red-ribbon shirts and began chanting right in the middle of his biographical portion (In fact, I could’ve sworn it was right after he gave the “son of a millworker” line, which was a clever signal to choose, if nothing else.) Edwards gave them a moment, asked the crowd to applaud the “activism of these young people,” calmly told a heckler he’d address their point after finishing his bio, and then said a few positive words about fighting AIDS at home and abroad (A critical world issue to be sure, but not a particularly controversial one in this day and age…c’mon, y’all, this isn’t 1988. And why try to derail a candidate who is politically sympathetic to your cause, particularly when Karl Rove is across town?) At any rate, no harm no foul for Team Edwards: He navigated this potentially rocky shoal extremely successfully, although I presume some advance guy or gal was given the serious what-for soon thereafter.

As for the trade stuff, I liked where he was going at first, but he eventually seem to fall back on the fair trade side of the usual dichotomy. As I see it, the problem isn’t free trade itself per se as much as the loss of American jobs, as well as the ugly spectacle of corporations firing tons of US workers only to turn right around and offer up a fat dividend. Edwards obliquely mentioned this formulation, then fell back on tax breaks for “good” corporations and the trouble with NAFTA. My feeling is, if you want to stop this kind of behavior, there needs to be more stick and less carrot. Hit business where it hurts: Tax the heck out of (or even, God forbid, disallow) corporate dividends that occur in the same fiscal year as the downsizing of X number of American jobs. Simply put, if you can’t afford to pay your workers anymore, you damn well shouldn’t be paying dividends to stockholders. Edwards came close to saying thus, but then fell back into the old free trade/fair trade rut, which to my mind is a bit like shouting into the wind. If you want to change corporate behavior, focus on corporate behavior…don’t blame the increasingly irreversible trend of globalization.

At any rate, all in all Edwards came off quite well, although not as inspiring or Clintonesque as I would’ve originally liked. He’s definitely got a great future in the party and in American politics, and he’d no doubt make a solid contender in this election season against the likes of Dubya (or Dick Cheney.)

Kerry Digs In, Dubya Dips Out.

As Kerry readies for the big fight ahead, the GOP starts getting real ugly, with doctored Hanoi Jane photos and Drudge-inspired, Murdoch-driven tales of a possible extra-marital dalliance. Yep, the GOP sure loves them the adultery card, but I don’t think that dog will hunt this time around…not after the impeachment fiasco. Update: The accused woman says drop it, already, and Drudge — without apologizing for slandering her or Kerry — changes his tune about the alleged affair.

On the flip side of the card, Dubya’s Document Dump answers few questions about his guard duty, and reports are now surfacing of National Guard documents destroyed by Governor Bush’s people in 1997. And then, of course, there’s the matter of that skipped drug test…

Dark City.


Bleak Week 2003 continued yesterday, when I finally got around to seeing the much-praised City of God. And while this fierce, hyperkinetic Brazilian film has some serious problems, it’s a much better night at the movies than Sunday’s foray into 21 Grams.

From its very first scenes, in which our young photographer-protagonist finds himself trapped in the midst of a Mexican (ok, Brazilian) standoff between a street gang and the corrupt cops, City of God makes no bones about its debts to Scorsese and Tarantino. In fact, for much of the film, I was reminded of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which brought to London much of the same snappy, experimental camerawork, “funny” gunplay, and street gangster-chic that’s on display here in Rio. But that metaphor only goes so far — this increasingly dark film ultimately feels very different than the breezy Lock Stock. In fact, while Scorsese, Tarantino, and Ritchie gangsters all generally find themselves on the wrong side of the law as a calling, the Brazilian youths here are born into it — crime, violence, and murder are an inescapable part of the Cidade de Deus.

Or is it? I know this movie is based on a novel based on real events, but at a certain point, right after the strobelight-marked murder of one of the film’s most likable characters, City of God just gets lost in its own cycle of violence. When L’il Ze, the cruelest hoodlum we meet on our travels, brutally rapes the girlfriend of Knockout Ned (we never see her again — she’s a plot point, not a character), a gang war ensues that drastically escalates the already considerable levels of death and carnage the audience has to deal with. In this final third, the film derails…it’s just too much.(Ken Turan aptly summed it up as “overkill.”) One goes from avidly following the travails of individual characters to watching most or all of them go down in a hail of gunfire.

Like I said, I know that much of this tale is based on a real gang war, and that the ridiculously high body count at the end of the film may have a solid grounding in fact. But at times City of God wants to have it both ways. When innocent bystanders are mowed down or child gangsters are forced to make extremely grisly life-and-death choices, we’re shocked sullen by the events depicted here. But when L’il Ze blows away his stooge Tuba in a fit of frustration, it’s a sight gag.

In sum, with swooping camerawork, great performances across the board, and a well-crafted narrative, City of God bridges the gap between Tarantino-cool gangsterism and shocking acts of violence reasonably well for its first two-thirds. Alas, it falters in the final act, and I found myself spending the last thirty-five minutes of a movie I’d quite enjoyed up til then keeping my head down and waiting for the last reports of gunfire to die away. Well worth seeing if you’re a fan of the hyperkinetic gangster genre, but ultimately City of God just can’t quite close the deal.

The Bin Laden Bounce?

Unfortunately, I missed Dubya’s flailing about on Russert Sunday morning, so I can’t really venture an opinion about how that went. (The rightniks seem dour about it.) But Salon has put up an interesting presidential popularity chart, which shows that Dubya’s approval rating has only spiked thrice: 9/11, the Iraq War, and Saddam’s capture. Makes you wonder if Karl Rove is on the phone with Pakistan this very moment.

The Calculus Affairs.

In a strange bit of movie news, Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski may be heading rival Tintin projects. Moreover, the Spielberg version is looking at Rupert “Ron Weasley” Grint or Jamie Bell as the boy detective in question…Not exactly star wattage, but I could see Bell in particularly working out. (And I could also see Spielberg going to the well and putting Tom Hanks or somebody as Captain Haddock.) As for a Polanski Tintin…I’m scared to think about it.

The Last Debate, the First Deserter, and the Primal Scream.

The Dems held one more for the road last night in New Hampshire and, given that a rather bland Kerry didn’t stumble, it’s starting to look dire for Dean, who was subdued and chagrined most of the evening and only now seems to be turning the corner on his Muskie Moment. Edwards did reasonably well despite invoking states’ rights (which never sounds good with a southern accent) to support his convoluted gay marriage position. And I actually liked Clark better than usual, and thought he handled his recent party switch as well as he could.

But, I have to say, I was extraordinarily irritated by the way the whole Dubya Deserter thing played out last night. First Peter Jennings tells Wesley Clark that Michael Moore’s deserter comment was “a reckless charge not supported by the facts” and asks him if it’d have been “a better example of ethical behavior” to contradict him. Clark doesn’t go either way on it, claiming not to know all the facts. (Which is lame — What’s the point of having a General in the running if he’s not going to call out Bush on exactly this question?) Then, once the show’s over, Fox News pulls out Team Bespectacled White Guys (Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes), who both immediately argue that Clark irreparably damaged his candidacy by not refuting this baseless charge, yadda yadda yadda.

Um, am I missing something? It’s been substantiated quite well that Bush seems to have gone AWOL by the Boston Globe and others, and I’m not talking about the six or seven critical hours on September 11 when he was toodling around above the Heartland. While absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence, Dubya seems to have disappeared from the Air National Guard for almost a year between 1972-73, conveniently right before a drug test (an offense for which he was grounded), and, to this day, he has never satisfactorily explained where he was. (In fact, as the Straight Dope notes, later reports in The New Republic (by Ryan Lizza, if I remember correctly) even cast doubt on the half-hearted “some recollection” explanation Dubya gave during the 2000 campaign. (By the way, this all happened several years after Bush scored in the underwhelming 25th percentile on the pilot’s aptitude portion of the entrance exam, thus having to rely on his congressman-daddy’s connections to jump the year-long waiting list for the Air National Guard in the first place.)

Does all of this prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Dubya pulled a Cold Mountain? Well, no, but it’s definitely enough to suggest that Bush has some serious explaining to do. (And he revoked any “youthful indiscretion” type-defense when he began parading around in flight gear on the USS Lincoln.) So, I mean, c’mon, now, a baseless charge about Bush? At this point it seems more correct to say that the bases were “Bush-less.” Next thing you’ll know Fox News will be screaming at John Kerry for perpetuating the “vicious rumor” of Dubya’s DUI.

At any rate, regarding other matters, I didn’t see Diane Sawyer or Letterman last night so can’t ascertain how Dean damage control went there, but I did catch the Dallas-Laker game on TNT, and during Inside the NBA EJ, Kenny and Charles must have played the Dean Scream about thirty times…in fact Ernie had it connected to his desk button. “Nash kicks to Dirk, Dirk from the corner…YEEEEEAAAAGH! Sacramento’s up big in the third…YEEEEEAAAGH!” And so on, so on. Pretty much the first political content I’ve ever seen on the show, and, yeah, it was funny every time. Poor Dean.

Lies in, Lies out.

Building on the recent revelation by Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that the administration started planning a war in Iraq immediately upon taking office — a revelation that dovetailed all-too-well with the recent Carnegie Endowment report on the administration’s WMD deceptions — Senator Ted Kennedy puts the war in perspective. “President Bush said it all when a television reporter asked him whether Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction, or whether there was only the possibility that he might acquire them. President Bush answered, ‘So what’s the difference?’ The difference, Mr. President, is whether you go to war or not. No President of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war. In doing so, the President broke the basic bond of trust between government and the people. If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war.” Quite a good speech and worth a read, if nothing else than because no less a right-wing freak show than Tom DeLay found it “sad” and “disgusting.”

In related news, Rick Perlstein examines Dubya’s electoral exit strategy: “George Bush is selling out Iraq. Gone are his hard-liners’ dreams of setting up a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic republic, a light unto the Middle Eastern nations. The decision makers in the administration now realize these goals are unreachable. So they’ve set a new goal: to end the occupation by July 1, whether that occupation has accomplished anything valuable and lasting or not. Just declare victory and go home…Such is the mess this president seems willing to leave behind in order to save his campaign.“

The Charleston Choice.

With Iowa and New Hampshire seemingly for Dean, both the Doctor and his rivals continue to hone in on South Carolina as a make-or-break state. As I said earlier, SC is probably the last, best hope for a Clark, Edwards or Gephardt to establish themselves as the Southern anti-Dean. As for Lieberman and Kerry, barring a fantastic upset in New Hampshire, it seems to be all over for the both of them, as their increasingly scorched earth rhetoric attests.

Foggy Winter.


If you can stand being bombarded by endless slo-mo shots of dropping ordnance set to a Phillip Glass pulse, The Fog of War, the new Errol Morris documentary about and extended interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, makes for an interesting evening out. Despite the heavy saturation on screen, there are no real historical bombshells dropped here — The movie doesn’t aim to muckrake a la The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and the picture you get of Vietnam-era McNamara is the same one you’d find in a book like Robert Schulzinger’s A Time for War: Publicly optimistic, McNamara seems deeply cognizant from early on that Vietnam will be a quagmire, but he — like LBJ and almost all of the foreign policy establishment — are too blinded by the fear of falling dominoes to consider withdrawal as a viable option. (McNamara does add fuel to the fire here that Kennedy wanted a full withdrawal by 1965. I guess if anyone would know, he would, but the books I’ve read don’t really bear this out.)

Nor do we ever seem to get under McNamara’s skin here — he remains intelligent and composed throughout, deflecting the tougher questions about Vietnam with a practiced ease. Still, McNamara, a surprisingly spry 86, does offer us some intriguing (and occasionally self-serving) reminiscences here about his experiences in the corridors of power, from his assessment that the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused mainly by simple, dumb luck to his thoughts on the morality of civilian fire-bombing, which he efficiency-maximized for Curtis LeMay during WWII.

As a documentary, The Fog of War sometimes gets clouded by its own cinematic devices — to take just one example, there’s a shot of dominoes across a map of Asia that is striking at first but fast becomes overused. And the continual Phillip Glass cascading over falling bombs and rushing people had me thinking of Koyaanisqatsi outtakes a lot of the time. In sum, the film works best when it’s simply an engaging monologue by an intelligent, evasive, and often frustrating Cold Warrior as he muses over a life perhaps not-so-well lived.