A couple of complex flicks

Taxi para tres is a thriller about the impossible moral complexities of life for the working, idling, robbing or just timidly persevering poor. Ulises (Alejandro Trejo), a taxi driver in a Santiago (Chile) slum, is kidnapped (so he will tell the police at the end of the adventure) by two young, reckless, stupid ruffians, who use his vehicle -- with Ulises as the driver -- to effect assaults on any available target, including other poor people. The knife- and pistol-wielding ruffians, childish moron Coto (Fernando Gómez ) and fast-talking Chavelo (Daniel Muñoz) later return to seek refuge in Ulises' house and ingratiate themselves with his family. Ulises is basically honest and protective but also -- like a lot of urban poor -- cautiously audacious. That is, he'll do very risky things when he calculates that the opportunities are right. There are no purely good guys in this movie, nor any purely bad ones -- even the brutal cop Padilla (Cristián Quezada) and the floozie who alternately betrays and protects Ulises (Elsa Poblete) just seem to be people doing the best they can in a twisted moral universe.

The other complex film is a movie about movies, and about art and the stimulus of formal restrictions. In The Five Obstructions (DE FEM BENSPÆND), young (b. 1956) Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier challenges a much admired senior (b. 1937) Danish journalist and filmmaker Jørgen Leth to remake Leth's 13-minute, 1967 film, "The Perfect Human" -- five times, each time under conditions (obstructions) imposed by von Trier. Leth is brilliantly up to all these challenges, the result being that we get to see Leth's six enormously diverse variations (the original plus the five remakes) on a theme within a film constructed by von Trier. And von Trier is himself a wonderfully inventive artist who relishes exploiting self-imposed "obstructions" (formal limitations) -- as you know if you've seen his disturbing recent movie, "Dogville" (for my blog on that movie, see Archive entry for 2004/05/03).

Anti-democratic pageant

For days now, American TV has been wall-to-wall tributes to the old actor who fronted for the great attack on American democratic principles that continues under the reign of the present usurper, GWB. Reagan was the man who, with a smile, vowed openly to take government away from the people and give it to the corporations. He was quite open about that, and he called it "freedom" -- using the word to mean exactly the opposite of what it meant in the Declaration of Independence. To Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, "freedom" meant enlarging the opportunities for citizens to "pursue happiness," and their government's job was to help them do that. To Reagan and his crowd, "freedom" meant enlarging the opportunities for corporations to pursue dollars, regardless of their effects on citizen's health, living standards or feelings of solidarity. Reagan allowed his minions to arrange financing for terrorists in Nicaragua, and called them "freedom fighters." He also backed that other group of terrorists in Afghanistan who morphed (it was an easy transition) into al-Qaeda and kindred groups.

What worries me is that so many Americans would mistake this man, Reagan, for a friend, when his actions were designed to make ordinary citizens like you and me ever less powerful in the face of the monied interests. This is not a new problem: shortly after World War II, Erich Fromm wrote Escape from Freedom, to understand why Germans, having had a chance at democratic government in the 1920s, supported a charismatic orator who wanted to turn them all into obedient robots. Those human robots were to serve German greatness, which meant wars of conquest and expanding industrial output.

G. W. Bush is a much less convincing actor than Reagan (and possibly even less intelligent -- and Reagan was one of the dumbest presidents on record). And W. is no orator at all. The American escape from freedom won't replicate the German experience of the last century, at least not in its details -- racism is not likely to have mass appeal here, and even where it does, the racists can't agree on whom to hate. But the readiness to have somebody else make our decisions for us, as long as that somebody guarantees us creature comforts, is still a lot like what Fromm described.

It may be time to renew Thomas Jefferson's call:

What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

[Here is the complete letter to William Smith, dated Paris, November 13, 1787.

For a summary of Erich Fromm's argument, see essay by Dr. C. George Boeree. Other things you might want to read: Planet Reagan , by William Rivers Pitt; Frank Rich's column in tomorrow's (Sunday's) New York Times (not yet on the web)

What some people will do when they're really angry

Bulldozer rampage in Granby CO

Check this out!

Bush is over. Nothing more needs to be said. The whole argument is laid out here.

A joyous way to protest the war and celebrate life

This will be the proper way to receive the delegates to the Republican National Convention in New York! Take a look at Artists Against The War and click on the "Banner Project."

R.I.P., R.R.

Ronald Reagan was not a great president. In fact, in his second term he was a barely functioning one. But he sure knew how to play one on TV!

Among other disasters, you will recall that he actually financed terrorists, including the organization that 20 years later destroyed the Twin Towers. U.S. covert action money built up the Nicaraguan Contras, the Angolan UNITA under the homocidal megalomaniac Joseph Savimbi, and -- worst of all for us -- the mujahedeen of Afghanistan and their Saudi confederates, including Osama bin Laden.

One big problem with Reagan was that he had too active an imagination. Things he'd dreamed up (that welfare queen with the Cadillac, for example) and movies he'd seen seemed real to him. W.'s problem (and ours) is that he has almost no imagination at all, or curiosity. And when he imitates Reagan's boyish grin, he just looks foolish. He may be no worse than Reagan as a real president (that would be a tough test), but he's abysmally worse at faking it. Reagan managed to fool all of the people (or nearly) some of the time; W. is fooling only himself and a dwindling sector of the willingly self-deluded.

For a fitting farewell to RR: Goodbye and Good Riddance by Phil Gasper.

Sound and fury

My friend Diana Wright is in Puget Sound, where she got to see a spectacular celestial show the other night. Besides saying "Wow!" she transmitted this AP story by DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP on the meteor shower: Meteor Light, Sound Rare Over Puget Sound

Here in Gotham, we've had nothing but rainstorms alternating with bursts of sunlight. For a little meteorological excitement, we went to see "The Day After Tomorrow," and watched the waves rise up to Lady Liberty's torch before the whole city froze over. Great scenes from inside the NY Public Library, one of my favorite places. The filmmakers blew all plausibility at the end, though: they had the Dick Cheney-like character say he was sorry (about having permitted the mass destruction of life by ignoring warnings of the catastrophe). The real Dick Cheney would never say he was sorry. It was also a mite implausible that, after everybody surviving in the U.S. had been evacuated to Mexico, the United States still had a government to make such pronouncements.

Hispanic Nation (Anonymously famous)

Bored and restless for other reasons, I just did a Google search for my 1996 book Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics and the Constructing of Identity, to see if either the book or the phrase was being mentioned. First thing that popped up was this article in the MARCH 15, 2004 issue of Business Week, "Hispanic Nation". It would have been nice if my book were mentioned -- there's really nothing in the article (except the interview of María Velázquez) that you won't find in my book, including the comparison with German immigration of a century ago. But then what I really wanted to do was insert the phrase and the argument into the debate, and it looks like I've done that.

See also America Becoming a Hispanic Nation, by Phil Brennan, Monday, Mar. 15, 2004, at NewsMax.com. And this Associated Press article, Professor Predicts 'Hispanic Homeland', wherein "A University of New Mexico Chicano Studies professor predicts a new, sovereign Hispanic nation within the century, taking in the Southwest and several northern states of Mexico." (That was just my phrase, not my argument -- I wasn't talking about a sovereign state, and don't expect one.) And for something a little weirder yet, NO FUMAR PARA LA SALUD DE LA FAMILIA (Don't Smoke for the Health of the Family), where the author manages to work this sentence into his anti-smoking argument: "The United States, long priding itself as a nation of immigrants, is well on the way to becoming an Hispanic nation."

I wanted to create a meme, and it looks like I did. OK, now back to work.

A luta continua

... as the Mozambican and Angolan revolutionaries used to say. "The struggle continues," and on at least one front we seem to be winning. Check out Nat Hentoff's report on resistance to the "Patriot Act" in the new Village Voice.

They swoop to kill dissent

"Everyone knows by now (or should) that the Patriot Act allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on Internet and email usage. Using so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), the FBI directs Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide passwords and identifying information that will allow the government to target people who are plotting terrorism or who are otherwise potentially dangerous to national security. I am sure that many of you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in our computers."

So begins Elaine Cassel's deeply troubling report in Counterpunch on the US Government's current efforts to suppress dissent, The Secrets of Surveillance. According to the ACLU's own report, these include "a broad gag order on any entity that receives a National Security Letter, or NSL. 

"The gag provision silences those who are most likely to oppose the Patriot Act," ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in his affidavit to the court. "It is particularly troubling" he said, that while the ACLU has been gagged from discussing the Patriot Act power, "President Bush and representatives of the FBI and Justice Department are engaged in a public campaign in support of the Patriot Act."

See ACLU website for more background.