December 29, 2006

EASTWOOD TURNS HIS MAGNUM IN FOR A KIMONO

Dirty Harry has finally succumbed to the endemic moral pathology of Hollywood. The best evidence of this is the New York Times’ A.O. Scott’s rating of “almost perfect” for Clint Eastwood’s new film “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Following suit, most of the major media reviews acknowledged it as a masterpiece and contender for many Academy Awards.

The film is a companion piece of sorts to “Flags of our Fathers,” the story of the iconic photo of the flag raising on Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima in February of 1945 and the horrendous battle for the island. Despite its ideological twists and turns, “Flags” was mostly a true story. The same cannot be said of “Letters.” The new “almost perfect” movie is mostly made up out of whole cloth. But to make it seem true a “McGuffin” is used. The Mcguffin here is the two scenes that frame the movie—the discovery of a mail pouch some time after the battle with a couple of hundred letters from Japanese soldiers which never made it home to their families until after the war. Whether this is factual or not is not clear, although from the lack of detail about this matter in the promotional material that accompanies the film one suspects that not very much of the film comes from the letters of ordinary soldiers. It is known, however, that General Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander, did write many letters to his wife and family, and some of these appear in the film.

But the scenes of the discovery of the mail pouch remain a McGuffin—a trick to make the audience believe that what they will see and hear is true, and that the dramatic narrative is derived from eye witnesses. It is of course not possible that the complex thoughts, feelings, actions and ideas shown in the film could be derived from a couple of hundred brief letters and postcards, especially after they have been vetted by Japanese censors whose job it was to remove the unpatriotic thoughts and feelings that get expressed in the movie.

The main character in the movie is a young conscript named Saigo, who is fictitious or perhaps a composite of several different ordinary soldiers. He is a likable soul, a baker by trade with a pregnant young wife, a basically incompetent soldier who couldn’t hit the side of a barn with his rifle if he tried. He thus becomes the goat of his unit and target of his sadistic Bushido-oriented captain. He grumbles good-naturedly throughout the movie, and makes friends with one or two other malcontents. And although there are scenes of cruelty and sadism committed by both armies, because we see the battle through the eyes and sensibility of Saigo we cannot help but feel sympathy with and for the ordinary Japanese soldier. He reminds one of a fresh faced kid who has wandered out of an Andy Hardy movie.

This sympathy is reinforced by the commander of the Japanese forces, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, depicted as a wise, gentle, highly respected leader who opposes the Bushido mentality of his junior officers.

On the whole, great pains are taken to show that the ordinary Japanese soldiers are not fierce fighters but just ordinary guys like Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe. Those familiar with the real Battle of Iwo Jima will be surprised to see the battle in the movie, which shows the Japanese as the victims of a merciless foe whom they fought with little food, water and ammunition and who, only as a last resort, chose death before surrender. You would not think, watching the movie, that this poor hapless army of twenty thousand half-starved guys could have killed 7,000 and mutilated another 14,000 Marines in six horrendous weeks of fighting. It just shows what simple, ordinary Japanese guys can do when they pull together.

Sure, all grunts are similar in that they miss their homes, their wives and sweethearts, they look at photographs of them before the battle, they tell jokes and form friendships, they are kind to little children and dogs. But their leaders are not the same. They are guided by an ideology that gives the conflict its character and may even have caused it in the first place. The Japanese were a militaristic nation bent on conquest and with a cult of death before dishonor, by seppuku (sword to the abdomen) if necessary—the way General Kuribayashi is believed to have died, not by an ivory handled U.S. Army Colt .45 as depicted in the film.

In the context of Clint Eastwood’s new movie, which seems to have a total amnesia for the history of the Japanese before February of 1945, it is important to call attention to what Eastwood and his colleagues have forgotten.

The historian Chalmers Johnson, who served as a naval officer in Japan and taught political science at the University of California, has said that:

"It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis powers, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Soviet civilians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced laborers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %."

Below, Clint Eastwood will find a list of more specific barbaric acts committed by those good-natured boys in the Imperial Japanese Army who loved their moms and girl friends. The details of them all are readily available on the internet.

In China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.95 million civilians were killed as a direct result of the Japanese invasion. The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 260,000 civilians and prisoners of war. A scorched earth strategy used by Japanese forces in China in 1942-45, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians.

Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia and amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths. Furthermore, "tens of thousands, and perhaps as many 200,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases..." caused by use of biological warfare.

In 2006, the first accounts of experimentation by the imperial military outside China were published. According to the BBC and Kyodo news agency, former IJN medical officer Akira Makino stated that he was ordered — as part of his training — to carry out vivisection on about 30 civilian prisoners in The Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945. The surgery included amputations and the victims included women and children.

According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito authorized by specific orders the use of chemical weapons in China. During the invasion of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions, despite Article 171 of the Versailles Peace Treaty and a resolution adopted by the League of Nations condemning the use of poison gas by Japan.

Japanese imperial forces are also reported to have used torture widely on prisoners, usually in an effort to gather military intelligence quickly. Tortured prisoners were often later executed. A former Japanese Army officer who served in China, Uno Shintaro, stated:

"The major means of getting intelligence was to extract information by interrogating prisoners. Torture was an unavoidable necessity. Murdering and burying them follows naturally. You do it so you won't be found out. I believed and acted this way because I was convinced of what I was doing. We carried out our duty as instructed by our masters. We did it for the sake of our country. From our filial obligation to our ancestors. On the battlefield, we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you're winning, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Japanese race was superior."

The Japanese military's use of forced labor by Asian civilians and POWs also caused many deaths. According to a joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Japanese Asia Development Board for forced labor. More than 100,000 civilians and POWs died in the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway, made famous in the film “The Bridge Over the River Kwai.”

The intent of Eastwood’s movie is to humanize the enemy; it’s in denial of the real, documented, witnessed behavior which was characteristic of the Japanese in WWII. In Hollywood’s POV we are all the same under the skin—Americans, 1945 Japanese, 1972 Palestinians, 2006 Jihadisits. And if there are no differences between us, why should we fight anyone, the Japanese then or the Moslem terrorists today?

So this is where we’ve been brought by postmodernism: there’s no such thing as truth, (every judgment is subjective), political correctness (mustn’t hurt anyone’s feelings), and multiculturalism (every culture has its own equally valid set of values—beheading, anyone?) All matters of history become relative, there is no good or evil, only different ways that cultures look at things and choose to remember them. So let’s be the first to scrap the idea that there was any point to us opposing the (fill in: Nazis, Communists, Imperial Japan, and by extension the Jihadists)—we just have to learn to understand them and accept our differences.

October 25, 2006

"FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS": CLINT EASTWOOD WANTS TO TEACH YOU SOMETHING IMPORTANT

Some men (and women) whom the gods would destroy, they first raise high for all to see. These men (and women) have been so successful, have amassed such wealth, and have acquired so many playthings—the grand houses on Lily Pond Lane, Chateaux en Provence, estates in Scotland surrounded by rushing streams rich with trout, or vast glass and steel condos looking out over Central Park, that they yearn for things that wealth cannot buy. These are men (and women) like George Soros, Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg. Besotted with their wealth they forget that they are ordinary men (and women) with small gifts for entertaining or trading in markets. The gods first enchant them with dreams of changing the world and then cast them into the outer space of narcissistic illusion, where they are doomed to watch their own inner movies forever.

One fears that Clint Eastwood is heading in that direction. He has become so successful as an actor, director and producer of movies that he may have forgotten that the gift he was given was to be used simply to entertain us, like a juggler, or a trapeze artist who makes us breathless with fear and then takes a smiling, confident bow.

Now he wants to teach us something important, to tell us what is right and what is wrong about the world. In his new movie, “Flags of our Fathers,” based on the best seller by James Bradley published in 2000, he wants to teach us how we should feel about the tragedy of war and about heroism, together with a little bit about our soulless, lying, cynical government.

You will find none of these pretensions in James Bradley’s book. He wrote it, he tells us, to figure out why his father, John Bradley, one of the anonymous men in the iconic photograph depicting the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, refused to talk about his experiences in the war. The book is the product of James Bradley’s search to understand his father, and in the process of discovery he tells us about the other five marines in the famous photo and a bit about what happened after they became famous.

Eastwood’s movie, on the other hand, is a bloated docudrama, which seems to take as long as the battle—thirty-six days—and seems to use about the same number of people in its cast and crew—70,000.

That is because, in trying to be faithful to James Bradley’s book as well as his own views of war, the movie tries to be about a heck of a lot of things:

There’s the war-is-hell theme.

There’s the in-war-everyone-is-a-hero theme.

There’s the son’s-search-for-the-real-father theme.

There’s the making-of-the-iconic-photo theme.

There’s the confusion-about-the-identity-of-the-sixth-man theme.

There’s the soulless-cynicism-and-hypocrisy-of-the-lying-government theme.

There’s the racism-against-Native-Americans theme.

There’s the how-the-war-and-government-destroy-little-peoples-lives theme.

A pretty heavy load of themes for one movie to carry.

There are so many flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks and such a chorus of narrators and disembodied voices that part of the first twenty or so minutes seems like orientation week at Iwo U.

Just as Spielberg gave us a taste of death, dismemberment and mutilation during the wordless invasion preface to “Saving Private Ryan,” Eastwood gives us a taste of death by confusion during the first part of “Flags of our Fathers.”

The battle for the tiny volcanic island of Iwo Jima was one of the two last great amphibious battles of the Pacific in World War II. In order to pursue the grand strategy of the final stage of the war—the invasion and occupation of the home islands of Japan—it was necessary to capture Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese knew that neither island could be denied the Americans, and thus the aim of any defense would be not to meet any invasion on the beaches, but to mount protracted campaigns that might sap the American’s will to proceed with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Iwo was the first of these to be invaded on February 19, 1945. For 72 days prior to the invasion Iwo Jima was bombarded by sea and air—the longest bombardment afforded any island in the Pacific theatre of operations. But the effectiveness of air and naval bombardment was largely offset by a combination of the deep, soft volcanic sand which covered the island and the Japanese preparation of a dense network of deeply placed tunnels, caves, and concrete gun emplacements designed so that no American marine would be protected from withering cross-fire. The net result of this defensive preparation made it almost impossible for the invasion forces to see the enemy or to know where they were shooting from.

Iwo was small and shaped like an ice-cream cone—10,000 yards bottom to top, and 4,000 yards across the top part of the cone. At the bottom of the cone was what was left of an extinct volcano about 550feet high—Mt. Suribachi—which contained hundreds of concrete pillboxes where the defenders lurked behind machine guns waiting for marines to get within firing range and pick them off. Inside the volcano there were over a thousand Japanese soldiers free to move about in interconnecting tunnels and get to where they had the best opportunity to kill Americans.

The island contained 21,000 of some of the Japanese army’s toughest and most determined troops, under the command of Lieut.General Tadamichi Kuribyashi. He had already issued an order to his officers: “Every man’s position will be his tomb.” And after thirty-six days of the most horrendous fighting, that was exactly the outcome for the Japanese—21,000 men dead. The aim of this suicidal tactic was to kill, maim, mutilate, and demoralize as many American marines as possible.

One of the first major targets of the invasion was Mt. Suribachi, an elevated and formidable fortress able to rain fire down on any part of the little island. The Americans landed in three Marine divisions—70,000 men—and fought on Suribachi for five days with many casualties before the stars and stripes was raised on its crest. That famous moment is the central focus of Eastwood’s movie.

How fierce and cruel the fighting on Iwo Jima was for more than a month can be expressed abstractly in numbers. It was the highest casualty rate of any engagement up to that time in 168 years of Marine Corps history—6,821 killed in action, and 19,217 maimed, mutilated, wounded. Admiral Nimitz issued a statement saying that “On Iwo island uncommon valor was a common virtue.” There were 353 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during the Second World War; 84 of these were awarded to marines fighting in the South Pacific, and of these 27 were awarded to the men fighting on Iwo Jima during that single month—a record unsurpassed by any battle in U.S. history.

Such unique wartime struggles always result in ironies, myths, betrayals, guilt, and, more than anything, the need for heroes. The raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi on D+4 is an event surrounded by powerful myths and Bradley’s book is an attempt to get to the truth of the great iconic photograph that recorded that event.

The true story, as pieced together by James Bradley over a period of several years from hundreds of interviews and documents, goes something like this. By the fifth day of savage fighting, Mt. Suribachi seemed uncharacteristically quiet. It was then that Col. Chandler Johnson sent a platoon of forty men to reconnoiter the peak of the mountain. “Just before the forty man patrol began its climb….Johnson called Lieutenant Schrier [leader of the platoon] aside….’If you get to the top,’ the colonel told Schrier, ‘put [this] up.’

“What Johnson handed the lieutenant was an American flag…relatively small…measuring fifty-four by twenty-eight inches.”

As they snaked their way up the hill neither the men nor their officers, nor the growing audience of marines all over the island watching them as they climbed higher and higher believed they would make it to the top. They were afraid that they were walking into a trap and that as they drew closer to the summit they would be attacked.

John Bradley, known to the other members of the company as ‘Doc’ because he was their medical corpsman, was in the group making the climb, as was a photographer from Leatherneck Magazine, Louis Lowry. The patrol clawed its way to the top at about ten A.M. as Sgt. Lowry photographed their ascent.

Searching for a staff to attach the flag to, the men found a length of pipe that was usable. “Then, knowing that this was an important moment that would be photographed, some of the patrol’s brass took over.

“Platoon Sergeant Thomas, Sergeant Hansen, and Corporal Lindberg converged on the pole. They took the folded flag out and tied it in place as Doc Bradley helped. Lou Lowry documented the proceedings with a steady succession of camera shots. He moved in close, suggested poses, cajoled the boys into self-conscious grins with his patter….As Lowry clicked [his final] exposure, an amazing cacophony arose from the island below and from the ships offshore. Thousands of Marine and Navy personnel had been watching the patrol as they climbed to the volcano’s rim. When the small swatch of color fluttered, Iwo Jima was transformed, for a few moments, into Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Infantrymen cheered, whistled, and waved their helmets. Ships offshore opened up their deep, honking whistles. Here was the symbol of an impossible dream fulfilled. Here was the manifestation of Suribachi’s conquest. Here was the first invader’s flag ever planted in four millennia on the territorial soil of Japan.”

Thus it was Thomas, Hansen, Lindberg, and Bradley who were the first flag raisers, and who deserved some measure of acknowledgement for their valor in making the climb to the top when everyone thought that they would never make it, and for making themselves targets in order to plant the stars and stripes and raise the spirits of the other 70,000 Marines still caught in savage battle.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had seen the flag-raising from the shore line and had decided that he wanted the flag as a souvenir. When the pugnacious Col. Chandler Johnson heard about Forrestal’s wish his response was “The hell with that.” The flag belonged to the battalion as far as the Colonel was concerned and he decided to secure it as soon as possible. He ordered another, larger, flag to be found with which to replace the original and sent a small detail of men up to the top to make the change.

It was long after the cheers had died out following the original flag-raising and no one was paying attention to the five men as they reached the peak and began preparing the replacement flag for the second raising. They were four men from the 2nd Platoon of Easy Company: Ira Hayes, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, and their squad leader Mike Strank, in addition to Rene Gagnon, a messenger who carried the new, larger, flag.

“As Rene handed Mike [Sgt. Strank] the replacement flag, the sergeant decided an explanation was in order.

“ ‘Colonel Johnson wants this big flag run up high...so every son of a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it.’

“ Mike directed Ira and Franklin to look for a length of pipe. He and Harlon started clearing a spot for planting the pole, and Harlon began stacking the stones.”

In the meantime Lou Lowry was heading down Suribachi after the first flag-raising and met two marine photographers and a civilian photo-journalist—marine Bob Campbell, a still photographer; Sgt. Bill Genaust, a cinematographer; and Joe Rosenthal, working for AP. He told them about the flag-raising and urged them to go up for the impressive views. When they reached the top and saw that the small original flag was about to be replaced by a taller, larger one they started taking pictures—Genaust movies, and Campbell and Rosenthal still pictures. So the entire scene was well witnessed and recorded.

As the five men of the flag replacement detail were struggling with the heavy and cumbersome pipe in the high wind that was whipping across the summit of Suribachi, Sgt. Mike Strank called out to Doc Bradley to give them a hand. “Mike saw Doc Bradley walking past with a load of bandages in his arms and asked him to come to help. Doc dropped the bandages and moved to the pole, directly between Mike and Harlon.

“Rosenthal spotted the movement and grabbed his camera.

“Genaust, about three feet from Rosenthal, asked: ‘I’m not in your way am I, Joe?’

“ ‘Oh, no,’ Rosenthal answered. As he later remembered, ‘I turned from him and out of the corner of my eye I said, ‘Hey, Bill, there it goes!’

“….Rosenthal remembers: ‘By being polite to each other we both damn near missed the scene. I swung my camera around and held it until I could guess that this was the peak of action, and shot.’ At that moment all nine muses must have swept down from Olympus and touched Joe Rosenthal’s finger to create the iconic photograph of World War II and arguably of the century up to that time—a picture of such classic beauty and power that it became world famous literally overnight.

“And then it was over. The flag was up….Campbell had gotten the shot he was after…Genaust had gotten the footage he wanted…Only Joe Rosenthal was unsure. The AP man didn’t even have a chance to glimpse the image in his viewfinder….Within a few more seconds the flagpole was freestanding, the cloth snapping and cracking in the wind….[But] no one paid any attention. It was just a replacement flag. The important flag—the first one raised that day—was brought down the mountain and presented to Colonel Johnson, who stored it in the battalion safe. It bore too much historic value for the battalion to be left unguarded atop Suribachi. The replacement flag flew for three weeks, eventually chewed up by strong winds.”

The AP photo editor on Guam, John Bodkin, was the first to discover Rosenthal’s beautiful shot. “He looked at it…shook his head in wonder, and whistled. ‘Here’s one for all time!’’ Without wasting any time he radio-photoed the image to AP headquarters in New York. Within hours it was in newsrooms all over America, and on Sunday, February 25, it appeared in the homes of 25 million readers. The image was so arresting that within weeks it was world famous as the expression of American determination and ultimate triumph.

The news of Iwo Jima since the invasion on February 19 had been so worrisome and troubling, so full of description of savage fighting, that it was not difficult for worried Americans at home to misunderstand this image of young men raising a flag on high ground. It was, to the people back home, a symbol of victorious battle. We had fought on Iwo against insurmountable odds and had prevailed. The battle was over and soon the war would be over. Those faceless men in the image were the warriors who had fought and triumphed against the cruel Japanese. They became heroes instantly in their anonymity. It didn’t matter who they were.

These events, which play a central part in Bradley’s book, are treated with minimal interest in Eastwood’s film. What grabs Eastwood’s attention is the opportunity to demonstrate to his public the hellish aspects of war. Nothing new there. The trouble with the non-controversial aspects of the movie is that the men who are its focus are not interesting people in this context. There is little or no inner human conflict that can be shown on the screen. So what you are left with is a story in which the central figures are passive victims of external forces—the battle of Iwo Jima and a war bond drive. Pretty thin stuff when you get down to it—in a movie that is meant to be BIG—unless you hoke it up. Which is what Eastwood is forced to do in the second half of the movie, where the central focus becomes Ira Hayes’ psychopathology during the war bond drive. Interest here is created by political stereotypes and much overacting.

But the most troublesome parts of Eastwood’s film are those that distort the spirit of 1945 through a post-modern sensibility. This is done, in part, by exaggerating the meaning and importance of the 7th War Bond Drive that took place in the Spring of 1945. The movie transforms the two months during which the three surviving young flag-raisers—John “Doc” Bradley; Ira Hayes, a young Pima Indian; and Rene Gagnon—went on tour to sell war bonds, into a vulgar, hypocritical sideshow. The representatives of the government are depicted as soulless cynics, unresponsive to the needs and feelings of the young marines who hated the fact that they were presented as heroes. They knew that in raising the second flag they had done nothing worthy of merit, while the others, living and dead, deserved the recognition.

The bond drive is acknowledged as necessary but somehow made to seem ignoble and grubby, when, in fact, it served an extremely important economic purpose. The bond drives were undertaken during the second and first World Wars not only for the purpose of supporting the material needs of the war—taxing the public could have achieved that. But it was even more important to prevent an inflation, during and after the war, of catastrophic proportions—the kind that Germany suffered after the first World War. What was prevented was huge amounts of cash generated from an economy of overfull employment chasing very few available goods. The sale of the bonds took 26 billion dollars out of the circulating economy and stored it safely in the cupboards and safe deposit boxes of millions of civilians until a later time when it could be redeemed with interest to purchase goods that were more available.

There was no sense of deception or exploitation at the time. The drives had their share of corny patriotism and tedium for those celebrities who participated in them, but there was no cynicism. Most people felt good about helping the war effort by lending money to Uncle Sam at a rate of 2.9% a year. And only a sophisticated few knew that they were saving themselves from inflation and an economic disaster in the bargain.

The movie exaggerates, too, the confusion about the identity of the low man on the right in the iconic picture. The matter was investigated and within a year the right marine was acknowledged publicly as the correct figure in the great photo.

In Eastwood’s movie this understandable confusion is transformed into a high level government conspiracy. The government is seen to be suppressing the truth in order to keep the public from finding out that a mistake was made.The powerful, soulless government lies to the public and covers up its lies, just as it does today.

But perhaps the most anachronistic aspect of the film is Eastwood’s view of heroes and heroism. If he could, Eastwood would eliminate the horrors of Iwo Jima, but if we cannot eliminate war and its horrors we should eliminate heroes and heroism. And we should get rid of the celebration of heroes. Over and over this theme is repeated—‘everyone who went to Iwo was a hero;’ or ‘the only heroes are the ones still there.’

The modern, politically correct view is not only that ‘war is hell,’ but that ‘war is unnecessary.’ And if there was no hero worship war would not be encouraged. Furthermore, heroism is a form of elitism and robs people of a sense equality; no one should be morally ranked.

In 1945 there was no shame involved in getting medals and being a hero. There was also no shame in not being a hero. All that is required of any soldier is that he do his duty. All that is required of any man is that he make some contribution to the protection of his home and children.

All wars and especially all savage battles like Iwo evoke much survivor guilt and feelings that one has betrayed those who died in battle. In addition to the legitimate grief in the loss of a loved comrade, there is a sentimental reaction in those survivors who are singled out for their valor—‘I do not deserve this honor, I let my buddy down. I would gladly give up this honor in return for the life of my friend.’

The fact is that there are wars, there have always been wars, there will always be wars—small and large, between neighbors, brothers, clans, tribes, towns, cities, states, nations, religions, classes, races, in short wherever there are differences to be found between people. Those differences will, sooner or later, lead to fighting. Xenophobia and aggression seem to be hard-wired into man’s nature.

The utopian notion that man can be taught to live peacefully with his fellow man inexorably drives those who are drunk with great wealth and power to believe that they can eliminate differences between men by giving everyone the same equal share.

What is hard to accept among those who value political correctness is that there are differences of degree in every living thing. In stature, intelligence, skills, in everything, even courage. They all were heroes on Iwo, those men who fought there, but some were more heroic than others. The case of the surviving flag-raisers suggests that this is so.

Neither Rene Gagnon nor Doc Bradley wanted to kill people when they joined the service. Rene joined because he wanted to be a hero, or be thought a hero by the girls and he thought that the Marine uniform was the most heroic looking—a girl getter. Doc Bradley specifically joined the navy because he did not want to be on the front line as his father was in the First World War. He hoped to become a pharmacist’s mate aboard ship, which was consonant with his peaceable nature and his wish to help people.

Bradley was surprised when he was chosen to be trained as a medical corpsman serving with the Marines. Throughout his service Bradley was admired, liked, and respected by all the men around him. He may have hated being in the battle of Iwo Jima, but his fear and hatred were set aside in the service of doing his job no matter what. “In the midst of the carnage, Doc Bradley ran through the chaos, doing what he could….He watched a Marine blunder into a cross fire of machine-gun bursts and slump to the ground. Doc did not hesitate…[he] sprinted through thirty yards of saturating cross fire—mortars and machine guns—to the wounded boy’s side. As bullets whined and pinged around him, Doc found the Marine losing blood at a life-threatening rate. Moving him was out of the question until the flow was stanched. The Japanese gunfire danced all around him, but Doc focused his mind on his training. He tied a plasma bottle to the kid’s rifle and jammed it bayonet-first into the ground. He moved his own body between the boy and the sheets of gunfire. Then, his upper body still erect and fully exposed, he administered first aid.

“His buddies watching him from their shell holes were certain that he would be cut down at any moment. But Doc Bradley stayed where he was until he thought it was safe to move the boy. Then he raised a hand, signaling his comrades not to help, but to stay low. And then my father stood up into the merciless firestorm and pulled the wounded Marine back across thirty yards to safety by himself. His attention did not flicker until the Marine was safely evacuated.

“This action—so heroic that two sergeants and Captain Severance came forward to report it—earned him his Navy Cross, an honor he never mentioned to our family. It was one of the bravest things my father ever did, and it happened on one of the most valorous days in the history of a Corps known for valor.”

Not much is made of John Bradley’s Navy Cross or the heroic actions that earned it in Clint Eastwood’s movie. In fact, much more is made of Ira Hayes’ self-destructive behavior and nervous breakdown because it suits modern sensibilities to celebrate Ira’s victimhood than to celebrate John Bradley’s heroism.

Unlike John Bradley, Rene Gagnon wanted to be a hero, to win the love of his girl by impressing her with his bravery—a common adolescent fantasy. He wanted to get something out of being a hero. And here is how he behaved under fire:

Rene Gagnon fired his rifle for the first time on March 12.

“He and a buddy had wandered into a cave, assuming it was empty—a mistake that had cost many Marines their lives. The two boys found themselves facing a lone Japanese soldier with his rifle aimed at them. As he told his son, Rene Jr., many years later, the New Hampshire mill kid had a blinding thought in the split second that followed: “We all have mothers. We’re all human. Why does this have to be?”

“Rene had his own rifle but he hesitated. He hoped, against all reason, that the Japanese would lay down his weapon. Instead, the enemy soldier fired. Rene’s buddy dropped dead. In the next second it would be Rene’s turn. He squeezed the trigger, and the Japanese crumbled. Rene stood in the cave, trembling. This was what the battle had come down to. To his son, he later recalled thinking: ‘Why did I have to do this? Looking down a barrel into someone’s eyeballs and having to kill him. There’s no glory in it.’” There seems to be no recognition that he had put his own anxieties and scruples above the life of his buddy.

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether there are degrees of valor and whether it is nobler to celebrate these degrees or to ignore them as Eastwood believes.

January 13, 2006

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN AND THE ROMANCE OF GAYNESS

I confess, I am a “High-grade Non Homophobic.” There, done! Out of the closet at last! I took the homophobia test yesterday and achieved a score of 17, thus putting me in the category of “high-grade non-homophobic,” the average score for white, male college students being around 30 (lower is better). The test was developed by Lester W. Wright, Henry E. Adams, and Jeffrey Bernat, and appeared in an article entitled "Development and Validation of the Homophobia Scale," in the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, Vol. 21, (1999), No. 4, pp. 337-347. You too can take the test if you are brave enough. [Click HERE]

Although it is always flattering to be acknowledged as a high-grade anything, I thought important to first establish my bona fides before saying the controversial things that I am about to say about “Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx, and gayness.

How was I able to achieve such a benign attitude towards homosexuals and homosexuality? Perhaps it is my age. I am ripe—some would say over-ripe—and ripeness sometimes brings with it a degree of humility when it comes to knowing what is right and true. Another factor might be that as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist and teacher of such young professionals I have had many opportunities to treat and supervise the treatment of homosexuals—those conflicted about their homosexuality and those unconflicted about their sexuality but unhappy about other aspects of their lives. In the course of these many clinical experiences I was able to learn much about the individual psychology and development of homosexuals and the sociology of the gay life.

“Best picture of the year!”
“Unmissable and unforgettable!”
“Big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center.”
“A big sweeping and rapturous Hollywood love story!”
“Hollywood’s first openly gay western.”
“Epic love story!”
“A story of forbidden love.”

For a movie with such rapturous reviews, seven Golden Globe nominations, full page advertisements, two of Hollywood’s newest and brightest stars, a cast of thousands (of sheep), the great mountains of Wyoming (Canada, really), gorgeous Big Sky country, “Brokeback Mountain” turns out to be a disappointingly small movie. Its mise-en-scene wears the story just as surely as Jake Gyllenhaal’s black cowboy hat wears him rather than the other way round.

It’s about the size of, say, “My Beautiful Laundrette,” of a generation ago, in which two young men kiss and make love on screen in a context of social and racial struggle. Controversial in its time, it is now a classic. And no doubt “Brokeback” will win prizes and become a small classic for its niche audience, if for no other reason. The performances are fine and the young men have taken risks for their career, and Hollywood always rewards young actors for taking risks in the service of homosexual values.

It is a movie in which two movie stars pretending to be two poor, dumb, young ranch hands, forced to be alone and isolated with each other for a couple of months, find themselves having sex, which turns out to have tragic consequences. Based on a prize-winning story by Annie Proulx, one of the problems with the movie is that the screen writers are too respectful of Proulx’s story. It is this fidelity to the short story that makes this film, with its awe-inspiring backdrop, seem so small. The story is characterized by emotional minimalism—the young men, Jack and Ennis, are barely articulate even at emotional high points. Much is communicated by silence or enigmatic looks and shrugs. This may work well in short fiction, but the art of writing a short story is different from the art of writing a movie. And after all a short story can only go so far in developing character and creating dramatic conflict.

Annie Proulx (pronounced Proo) is, without a doubt, a first-rate writer. And “Brokeback Mountain” is a good but flawed story. Its flaws emerge out of its origins. “Brokeback began as an examination of country homophobia in the land of the Great Pure Noble Cowboy,” Proulx says on her website. The use of the word “homophobia” in her explanation (about which more later) and the ambivalence towards men expressed in the sarcasm “the land of the Great Pure Noble Cowboy” is expressed more subtly in her story and more flagrantly in the movie that was made from it. Her grievances with men, or at least men who live by “white masculine values,” as she calls them, profoundly influence “Brokeback Mountain.” Perhaps her own personal disappointments with men may have played a part in this, perhaps not. She was married three times, the last “…ended in amiable divorce twenty years later after a long separation, and we remain friends. It gradually dawned on me that I am not well-suited for marriage.”

She elaborates on the origin of the story: “Sometime in early 1997 the story took shape. One night in a bar upstate [Wyoming] I had noticed an older ranch hand, maybe in his late sixties, obviously short on the world’s luxury goods. Although spruced up for Friday night his clothes were a little ragged, boots stained and worn. I had seen him around, working cows, helping with sheep, taking orders from a ranch manager. He was thin and lean, muscular in a stringy kind of way. He leaned against the back wall and his eyes were fastened not on the dozens of handsome and flashing women in the room but on the young cowboys playing pool. Maybe he was following the game, maybe he knew the players, maybe one was his son or nephew, but there was some¬thing in his expression, a kind of bitter longing, that made me wonder if he was country gay. Then I began to consider what it might have been like for him—not the real person against the wall, but for any ill-informed, confused, not-sure-of-what-he-was-feeling youth growing up in homo¬phobic rural Wyoming. A few weeks later I listened to the vicious rant of an elderly bar-cafe owner who was incensed that two "homos" had come in the night before and ordered dinner. She said that if her bar regulars had been there (it was darts tournament night) things would have gone badly for them. ‘Brokeback’ was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth.”

Proulx’s method of literary creation—keen but superficial observations which excite her imagination along lines that have been influenced by her lifelong loves and hates—help us to understand both the high quality of her prose and its weaknesses. To the extent that her work is taken from life she is very good, to the extent that it becomes burdened by an overload of personal baggage her work becomes strained and false. But before demonstrating some of these strengths and weaknesses, it is important to examine what is meant by “homophobia,” since that seems to be what started it all.

“Homophobia” is a word that came into being around 1969 with “Gay Liberation.” It was coined by Time Magazine and elaborated by Martin Weinberg of the Kinsey Institute as a term with a great deal of psychological freight. It soon came to be a way of paying back the mental health establishment, a kind of turnabout. In the days before Gay Lib, homosexuality was thought of by psychiatrists as a form of psychopathology, with the implication that it can and should be changed or cured. With the arrival of Gay Liberation in the 70s it was the gay establishment’s turn. Under political pressure the term “Homosexuality” was removed from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual—the bible of psychiatric administrators—as a pathological entity and began to be thought of by gay activists and their supporters in the liberal media as “normal” in the sense that one was born with the trait, like blue eyes or left-handedness—a normal variation.

Homophobia, it was now proclaimed, was what was pathological, with its own psychodynamic patterns—a fear of homosexuals, some psychologists speculated—and thus should be treated and cured by re-education, brainwashing.

Like some kind of expanding, space-occupying monster, the meanings of the word “homophobia” in the homophilic media continued to grow from year to year, so that now there are almost as many meanings as there are people who use the word. It is, of course, not a scientific or medical term, like claustrophobia or agoraphobia, which are clinical syndromes with long histories associated with them and an extensive psychiatric and psychological literature that can be studied and investigated. It has no standard or universally recognized set of descriptors. For some it may apply to people who commit so-called “Hate Crimes”—those who assault, kill, or manifestly abuse homosexuals, criminal behavior whether hate is involved or not. For others it means any form of expressed opinion which may be inimical to homosexuals and/or their values. For yet others it may refer to anybody who engages in rational discourse—policy makers for example, or scholars who hold opinions about homosexual issues that are in opposition to those held by the gay establishment. The latter by this time is a powerful army made up of three divisions: gifted, articulate, well-funded, gay men and women activists; a large and sympathetic component of media people in Hollywood, journalism, and television; and the softer disciplines of the academy—the social sciences, schools of education, and the humanities.

The same kind of dangerous overgeneralization that was used to characterize previous social victims—Jews, homosexuals, blacks—now operates on anyone who is brave or foolhardy enough to express politically incorrect views on gay issues. Since “homophobic” can mean murderer as well as dissenter, it has connotations of dangerousness and intolerance, in the way that all Jews were Christ-killers and usurers, all Blacks were rapists of white women, and homosexuals were pedophiles.

Ms. Proulx likes to write about life in the cooler part of rural North America—between the 40th and 50th parallel—and between Newfoundland and Wyoming. Proulx stories are stories about people living hardscrabble lives in situations that can only get worse—the land is being used up, or the sea is being fished out, victims of time and place—and how they respond. “If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it,” says Ennis Del Mar, one of the two young protagonists in “Brokeback Mountain.” It is this platitude that informs his narrow, dreary life. His longtime friend and lover, Jack Twist, cannot live according to Ennis’s drab slogan and dies trying to escape it.

“Brokeback” and its problems center on the ambiguities of love and sex. It is to Ms. Proulx’s credit that she never uses the word “love” in the story. But it’s there nonetheless. There is some mysterious force at work between the two men that holds them together for twenty years, and the reader wonders what it is.

When gay writers talk about homosexuality in public it often suits their rhetorical needs to use the word “love” as a euphemism for sex. Here, for example, is Tony Kushner on the subject. “The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it’s ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they’re attacking the center of your being.” Since no one considers the emotional component of love between men, such as the love between fathers and sons or close friends, to be perverse or ugly, what he means when he says “give love” in this case is have sex. And to refer to having sex as “profoundly human” is baffling. Having sex is the thing we have in common with all mammalian species. Conventionally what we mean when we use rhetorical phrases like “profoundly human” is the very opposite of having sex—what we usually mean is something that has to do with soul or spirit or mind rather than genitals.

This euphemistic usage of the word love is a development which occurred after the onset of AIDS in the early eighties. Before that time love was an important aspect in a homosexual relationship mainly in more or less stable couples who cared about one another above and beyond their sexual relationship. This state accounted for about 25% or 30% of homosexuals in the seventies according to the work of the Kinsey Institute. To the other 70% or 75% of gay men stability and loving relationships were merely rhetorical. The majority of gay men wanted complete and unbridled sexual freedom at the time of the story (before AIDS) and non-sexual love and commitment were not high on their agenda.

Proulx’s story has many first-rate qualities but its understanding of male psychology is not one of them.

It’s a story that hates men—fathers in particular. There are three fathers and one father-figure in the story. All are depicted as “duck studs,” brutal and cruel in the service of teaching manliness. The movie goes even further, turning every man with a speaking part into a crude, drunken, violent fool.

“Write about what you know!” The advice comes ringing down the ages from every great writer. But Proulx does not seem to know much about male sexuality, or homosexuality, or even maleness in general, or what it means to be a man. And because she has her own agenda for the story, she has to create characters who will fulfill that agenda, rather than creating real characters who will find their own fates.

What is her agenda? Homophobes are the real problem for loving men. This theme requires that she invent a story about true love (not merely sex) between two unambiguously gay men that must have a tragic end in a place like “homophobic rural Wyoming” which is “the land of the Great Pure Noble Cowboy.” Her agenda is to diminish the iconic myth and to show them as fatuous brutes.

Because of the heavy message burden the film has to deliver there is much that is bogus and inauthentic. The first things are the boys’ personae. They are supposed to be dirt poor, high school dropouts, ignorant, not very bright, inarticulate. One, Ennis, is chronically depressed, the other, Jack, affably sociopathic. Instead of being played by gorgeous, well- built movie stars with perfect teeth and bodies and wearing their $99 cowboy hats, they should be played by actors like Steve Buscemi with his mouth full of rotten teeth and Michael J. Pollard with dirty fingernails and with both wearing old beat-up $19 straw ranch-hand’s hats.

The nature scenes, the bars, the grubby plastic furniture, all contribute to a sense of pseudo-authenticity that masks the phoniness of the extraordinarily attractive and charming movie stars trying to play impoverished, ignorant, inarticulate, rural boobs. In the movie Jack appears smart enough to become a crack salesman demonstrating complex farm equipment; in the story he’s not competent enough to do anything but hold onto a bucking bull.

But most of all, the phoniness is in the character inconsistencies and the lack of understanding of men—their sexuality, their homosexuality—making them act according to some preordained plan instead of like real men or real homosexuals, all in the service of fulfilling the theme of the story—“destructive rural homophobia.”

Although there are inconsistencies and falseness in Ennis’s character (his adolescent schoolgirl reaction to Jack’s return after a four year absence) the major problem is with Jack Twist. Jack is the instigator of sexual intimacy with Ennis. And the sexual hunger that is shown repeatedly in the story suggests that he has little or no conflict about his intense passive homosexual wishes. A homosexual man with such intense needs as Jack, which are not satisfied by means of his heterosexual relationship, will not usually wait four years or even four weeks to have his sexual needs satisfied. It just doesn’t work that way in real life. He is the kind of homosexual who has no trouble finding ways to satisfy these sexual yearnings. And Proulx shows us nothing in Jack’s behavior that might suggest any conflict about these feelings. The only thing that deters him from visiting Ennis more frequently is Ennis. Why does he put up with this sexual deprivation? Because the author’s agenda demands it. Proulx’s plan requires that the story be touching and tragic. Unless, by the story’s end, the reader/viewer empathizes with Ennis and hates homophobes she will not have achieved her aim. And the key to that is that the two must love each other in an unselfish, non-sexual way.

Proulx tries to establish this in the central literary moment in the story, near the end, meant to explain Jack’s motivation for his strange relationship with Ennis:
“What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.
“They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.
“Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.”
The excerpt above arouses deep suspicion. It is quite unique in the story—quite different from the writing in the rest of it. It is deeply emotional and elegiacal, qualitatively different from the cool, dry narrative that surrounds it. It sounds like it came from deep within Proulx’s life experience. “Write what you know!” Having raised two sons it would not be surprising to know that she was able to reconnect with a touching moment in her own life to provide this scene with the necessary feeling.

Why is this scene so important and necessary? Proulx worked on the story for six months, twice the length of time that it usually takes for her to write a novel, she says, having revised the story sixty times. And guess what was the most difficult scene for her to write? The scene above.

This epiphanous moment has power and would explain Jack’s prolonged fixation on Ennis if it were consistent with anything else about Jack—but it is not. So we have only the author’s word for the power of this recollection.

This is only the latest film of many plays and films of the past thirty-five years that form part of the gay agenda to create a romance about gayness, just as, at one time, Hollywood created a romance about cowboys—brave, true, shy, handsome, modest, and sober. Today and for the past generation Hollywood and the media portray gays as charming, lovable, vulnerable, and gifted; and as victims—of AIDS (striking out of some indeterminate source), homophobia, or some governmental or religious prejudice.

This romantic model is as phoney as the old cowboy model but what is important is that it serves the political aims of gay activists—currently gay marriage.

The realities are more complex, more varied, and more interesting. First, some of the realities about the gay life. Approximately three percent of the population may be homosexual, depending on how it is defined and measured demographically. This group is very varied, by age of onset, race, class, choice of sex-object, mode of gratification, pattern of behavior, etc. About 35 percent of all homosexual males have stable, well-adjusted relationships. These are closed couples held together by strong affectionate bonds and living lives much as heterosexual couples might. The remainder of the population do not have stable commitments and prefer freedom and independence. It is from this latter group that dangerous sexual behavior may emerge: “bareback riding” (unprotected sex); promiscuity; “gift-giving” (homosexuals infected with HIV virus who want to transmit the virus to those who don’t have it); “bug chasing” (men who do not have AIDS but want to acquire it); as well as other dangerous activities, none of which would fit the romance of gayness.

Now, some of the realities about homophobic crimes—murder and manslaughter—so-called hate crimes. Hate crimes are acts you hear quite a lot about in the homophilic media. The FBI has kept records of such crimes since 1995. If you look into these records, you will find that the number of murders and/or manslaughters against male homosexuals number between two and six in any year between 1995 and 2004. Only one of these occurred in Wyoming—in 1998. Most of them tend to occur in California, New York and Texas. So much for Ms. Proulx’s destructive rural homophobia. Of course even two murders a year against male homosexuals is too much. But strangely enough we hear very little outcry and protest when you look into the number of deaths of male homosexuals caused by AIDS—10,000 in any year. Such facts do not contribute to the romance of gayness.

December 15, 2005

INDIANA SPIELBERG AND HIS JEWISH PROBLEM

Without the bullwhip and hat, but with his camera, his moviola, and his trusted young sidekick, Tony Kushner, Steven Spielberg has set out to do what no great head of government alone or in concert, no statesman, not even Winston Churchill, not even the United Nations when it was still shiny, hopeful, and had clout, has been able to do since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire—solve the riddle of the Middle East.

Befitting such an heroic undertaking, Time Magazine has put Spielberg on its cover and given him eight pages of copy and pictures with which to hyp…er…celebrate his new movie “Munich,” which the magazine calls his “Secret Masterpiece.”

In the fantasy world of Steven Spielberg, ever since he was a little boy making movies, every hero has had a secret bit of magic up his sleeve with which to win the struggle against evil and this time the magic is his new movie “Munich.” It is with “Munich” that he plans to solve the Arab/Israeli problem. How? You’ll be surprised.

The movie takes its name from the events that occurred on September 5, 1972 at the Olympic Games held in Munich that year. On that day 11 young Israeli athletes were taken hostage and, after being held for many hours, murdered in cold blood by their captors, a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September, an offshoot of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.

Betrayed by the West German Government and the nations represented at the Olympic Games, the outraged Israelis developed a plan to avenge these murders and deter other outrages of this kind. The plan was to send out a number of teams of counterterror assassins to kill those who had anything to do with the Munich massacre or any known acts of terrorism.

Between the two stories—the massacre story and the revenge story—there is little to choose. Both are gripping, human, dramatic, full of twists, suspense, and irony. But if you emphasize the massacre story, the sympathy is bound to be be for the Israeli athletes and their wives and families. If you emphasize the revenge story the sympathy could easily be with the Arab victims and their families.

It is the latter story that Spielberg and his pacifist-moralist scriptwriter, Tony Kushner, want to tell in their film. Or rather it is the revenge story that they want to use as the basis for Spielberg’s grandiose fairy tale. The movie is only “inspired” by the events of the Olympic massacre in Munich. Not at all like “Schindler’s List,” a serious film about the real people on Schindler’s list ageing but still alive and breathing at the end of the movie, “Munich” is more like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a fantasy peopled by creatures of Spielberg’s imagination. Unfortunately, it is a work of the imagination corrupted by Spielberg’s moral egotism and grandiosity.

“Would it be fair to say that this movie is, in the end, about the human cost of a quagmire?” the Time interviewer asks Spielberg, meaning not the Iraqi war but the Israeli-Palestinian war. “Yes,” Spielberg answers. “And also for me this movie is a prayer for peace. Somewhere inside all this intransigence there has to be a prayer for peace. Because the biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis.The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence.”

Only two more brief quotes from Time’s interview will be enough to suggest what Spielberg is up to. “…And there’s a project I’m initiating next February that I think might also do some good….What I’m doing is buying 250 video cameras and players and dividing them up, giving 125 of them to Palestinian children, 125 to Israeli kids, so they can make movies about their own lives—not dramas, just little documentaries about who they are and what they believe in, who their parents are, where they go to school, what they had to eat, what movies they watch, what CDs they listen to—and then exchange the videos. That’s the kind of thing that can be effective…in simply making people understand that there aren’t that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians—not as human beings, anyway.”

“In the same way,” Time Magazine suggests, “Everyone in the movie is human, you feel for them all.” “Right,” Spielberg responds, “I think the thing I’m very proud of is that Tony Kushner and I…did not demonize anyone in the film….They’re individuals. They have families….”

As the reader can see, there is no evil in Spielberg’s real world—only in his Indiana Jones world—thereby transforming it into a world of fantasy. We wonder whether it ever occurred to Spielberg that all those nice SS officers who ran the concentration camps were individuals and had families and played Mozart on the piano when they weren’t stringing Jews up on piano wire.

The fact is that Steven Spielberg has become a billionaire ten times over by exploiting his childlike imagination. He has a genius for combining three ingredients in the right proportions: grandiosity, little boy fantasies, and narcissistic self-confidence.

But in this winning recipe there is lacking all the things that would ruin all those Indiana Jones adventures—complex motivation, judgment, ambivalence, skepticism, and an understanding of how the world really works. Some part of his mind is still 9 or 10 years old. You know how it is when you are that age—you read Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books with pleasure because in them children seem to be able to solve grown-up problems and they do not see that the world has been simplified for them by the genius of the author.

You can see the childish quality of Spielberg’s thinking from his remarks about the movie. What causes the problem is “intransigence”—not the Jews or the Palestinians but some disembodied force called “intransigence.” And if we pray hard enough or give the children video cameras so that they each can see how much alike they are, that they are all individuals with families, then their intransigence will go away.

Spielberg cannot deal with irrational motivation, passionate beliefs, ambivalence, unforgiving rage—all facts of life commonly found in the Middle East. So he avoids looking at historical fact and turns to social-worker-like solutions. Why, for example, did he not consult with anyone who could have provided for him a historical context? It would have interfered with his ideology—his need to prove that everybody is the same morally.

THE HISTORICAL FACTS YOU WILL NOT LEARN ABOUT IN SPIELBERG’S MOVIE THAT MOTIVATED GOLDA MEIR’S POLICY OF AGGRESSIVE DETERRENCE

The murder of Israeli athletes was coolly planned in the summer of 1972 at the pleasant cafes on the Via Veneto in Rome by the leaders of Black September. In July they were in a fit of pique at the International Olympic Committee, which they felt had insulted the PLO by not allowing it to participate in the upcoming games in Munich. The leaders, Abu Daoud, and Abu Iyad, had been among a handful of sophisticated PLO activists who wanted to continue their terrorist activities without jeopardizing the increasing political stature of Arafat’s PLO and Fatah. By creating a fictitious organization—Black September—they were able to provide plausible deniability to Arafat. “Who, me? I don’t know anything about terrorism.” In fact, the leaders of all the Palestinian groups were frequently in contact and assisted each other whenever possible. (The name Black September was taken from the period around September 1971 when the Jordanians, in the service of their own political interests, forced the Palestinian terrorists out of Jordan.)

The Black September leadership had failed in several earlier terror projects and were searching for some dramatic act that would catch the world’s attention and put them on the terror map as the Japanese Red Army had done several months earlier in May 1972 when three members of the group had machine-gunned to death 24 Puerto Rican religious pilgrims and wounded 78 other passengers in the Tel Aviv airport. To Aboud and Iyad the Munich Olympics sounded like just the ticket. They formulated the plan to capture and hold as many Israelis hostage as they could and threaten to kill them one by one unless their demand to release 234 of their fedayeen brethren from Israeli prisons was met, even though they knew from previous experience that such a demand was a non-starter for the Israeli government. How they thought such a scenario would play itself out is not clear—but they knew that by September the world would have heard of Black September.

Without the circle of sophisticated leadership of Black September there would have been no massacre. The media in America and Europe often purvey the foolish notion that acts of terrorism are spontaneous outbursts of an oppressed people like the recent events in the Paris suburbs—a downtrodden mass of people breaking their bonds. Nothing could be further from the truth. Spielberg, take note.

Abu Iyad took the most important first step by choosing the commander of the group that would execute the Munich terror operation. It was this man, “Issa,” small, tense, and wiry, who maintained iron control of the seven other young terrorists and kept their focus until the final denoument. Without him there would have been no possibility of carrying out such a plan. The foot-soldiers, the fedayeen, did not have the sophistication, the language, the adaptability, or the intelligence.

“Issa,” a nom de guerre, was in reality Luttif Afif, a Palestinian militant whose mother was Jewish and whose father was a wealthy Christian Arab businessman. In 1958 he had moved to Germany to study engineering, and learned the language. He moved around Europe easily, enjoying a playboy life. At some point he returned to the Middle East, joined Fatah and fought in some battles against Israeli soldiers. By 1972, however, he was in Berlin engaged to be married to a young German woman.

Ironically, Spielberg and Kushner remain in the grip of the naïve idea that the reason that the Israeli-Palestinian problem still exists is because the two peoples don’t understand each other and if only they could see how much alike they were—that they have the same human qualities—their intransigencies would diminish and disappear.

“I never like to draw lessons for people," says screenwriter Tony Kushner about the Middle East question. "It's not an essay; it's art.” (A self delusion, at best, as anyone can tell you who has spent six tedious hours listening to the essays and lectures in “Angels in America.”) “But I think I can safely say the conflict between national security and ethics raised deep questions in terms of working on the film. I was surprised to discover how much the story had to do with nationality vs. family, and questions about home and being in conflict with somebody else over a territory that seems home to both people."

There is an entirely fictional scene in the movie in which Avner, the protagonist, and his Palestinian opposite number meet and talk calmly, with the latter getting a chance to make his case for the creation of a homeland for his people. That scene means everything to Kushner and Spielberg. "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills," says Spielberg. Without that exchange, "I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie--good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context. And I was never going to make that picture." In fact he has made that picture over and over—what are the Indiana Jones films but good guys vs. bad guys. Spielberg’s problem is that he cannot allow himself to see the Israelis as good guys as long as they refuse to allow themselves to be victims anymore.
Spielberg doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that although the leader of the terrorist murderers, “Issa,” was a man who loved his family, was not a muslim, was not poor, was not deprived, was worldly and sophisticated and understood who and what Jews and Israelis were like, it did not matter at all—he still ordered the cold-blooded murder of eleven innocent young men who also had families.

Even before the Israeli athletes arrived in Munich, the Israeli government, understanding that their young citizens might be at risk on foreign soil, asked for permission to provide their own security and were turned down. Furthermore, it was part of Germany’s policy to have minimal security protecting the athletes and grounds. This was because West Germany and Bavaria wanted to demonstrate to the world that German militarism of old and Nazism were gone forever.

Even after the eleven athletes were captured and two of them were shot to death and their bodies were dumped out of a second story window, there was little or no sympathy or cooperation provided by the Olympic Committee. There was no way that old Avery Brundage, autocrat of the Committee, was going to allow anything to rain on his parade. “The organizers of the Games naturally wanted the Games to resume as soon as possible,” the Police Chief of Munich, Manfred Schreiber, said in an interview. “The organizers…want peace and quiet, they want the event to take place unhindered, they want the event to continue without any delays….” The Olympic Committee refused to cooperate with the rescue attempts or acknowledge the danger that the hostages were in. The Israelis were treated like bad sports who were interfering with everybody’s fun.

It soon became apparent that the German officials handling the negotiations with the terrorists were in way over their heads. But when the Israelis petitioned then Chancellor Willy Brandt to allow Israeli commandos, who had experience with Palestinian terrorists, to assist the German police Brandt refused to allow them to take part in the crisis.

Baffled by the unconventional and intransigent attitude of “Issa” and the terrorists, and inexperienced in rescue operations, the West German authorities organized a clumsy and transparent attempt to rescue the nine remaining hostages at a military airfield on the outskirts of Munich which was so incompetently handled that a horrendous fire-fight broke out, resulting in the deaths of all of the hostages as they sat in two helicopters awaiting their rescue. In addition one German policeman and five of the eight terrorists, including “Issa,” were killed. The Palestinians took pains to kill all the Israelis, who were bound and gagged—one group by hand-grenade and one by machine gun fire.

The details of the botched rescue attempt and shootout were never revealed to the press at the time but can be seen in a superb documentary film, “One Day in September,” based on many hours of interviews with those who participated in the events of that day (click HERE). An excellent book with the same title (click HERE) but much more detail, written in association with the documentary but independently by Simon Reeve, a British journalist, appeared in the same year, 1999. In it he tells the shameful story of the German cover-up and the true Israeli response to the Munich Massacre. Spielberg, take note.

The insults of that day—the arrogant, cold-blooded, murderous behavior of the terrorists; the disregard and indifference of the politically powerful Olympic Committee; the rigid, bungling, incompetent German police—all of these fed the outrage of Golda Meir and her ministers in the weeks afterward while they were formulating a rational policy to deal with Arab terrorism. The first principle was to depend on their own Israeli resources to protect their citizens because no one else seemed to care.

If what happened on September 5, 1972 wasn’t enough to force the policy of retaliation, what happened less than two months later made it a virtual certainty.

On the morning of Sunday, October 29, a Lufthansa Boeing 727 on its way to Frankfurt from Beirut was hijacked by two Palestinian terrorists who demanded that the three Black September terrorists who survived the Munich shootout were to be released immediately. If not they would blow up the plane.

Without even informing the Israeli government as a courtesy, the Germans capitulated and told the hijackers that the three men would be ready to be picked up within an hour and a half. According to Chancellor Willy Brandt: “The passengers and crew were threatened with annihilation unless we released the three Palestinian survivors of the [Munich] massacre. Like the Baverian government, I then saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed.”

In the course of the making of the documentary film and writing of the book “One Day in September,” it was revealed that the hijacking had been set up between Black September and the German government. The Palestinians had threatened the government that they would launch a wave of bombings and hijackings against Lufthansa unless the three Munich terrorist survivors were released. The “hijacking,” according to sources in Germany, Israel, and Palestine, was a compromise agreed to by senior officials in the German government. “Yes, I think it’s probably true,” said Ulrich Wegener, who was an eye-witness to the events at the time and who later became founder of the elite GSG-9 West German counterterrorist unit after the Olympics. “The German government thought they could negotiate with the terrorists and could convince them that they would give them money and something else to get rid of them….But of course it was the wrong way, no question, because when one case is solved in this way other cases will come.”

GOLDA’S LAST STRAW

Simon Reeve, author of “One Day in September,” states that “Regardless of whether the release of the three Munich fedayeen was a ‘put-up job,’ in the words of one Israeli official, there was astonishment and fury in Tel Aviv when news came through of their release.” Golda Meir said she “was literally physically sickened….I think that there is not one single terrorist held in a prison anywhere in the world. Everyone gives in. We’re the only ones who do not.”

According to Reeve, it was the release of the terrorists that was, for Meir, the last straw. “Officials had already pleaded with her to authorize the establishment of an undercover unit to track down and assassinate those blamed for the Munich massacre. Any doubts she might have had about responding violently were quashed by the release of the three murderous conspirators.” It was then that Meir gave the command to General Aharon Yariv and Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad, to organize the undercover assassin team.

You will see none of this in Steven Spielberg’s childlike retelling of the Munich massacre story. It would not fit in with his revision to show the Israeli’s patience, forbearance, and cooperativeness, and the ruthlessness, indifference, and contempt shown to the Israelis by the terrorists, the Germans, and the Olympic Committee, without which there might not have been any need for retaliation.

The full truth about the Israeli assassination teams will probably never be known since the basis of all such operations is complete deniability, however implausible these denials may be. But alongside Simon Reeve’s excellent book, a book that has added many further details since 1984 is “Vengeance,” by George Jonas, reissued in 2005 with new material [click HERE]. It is the story of “Avner,” a nom de guerre for an Israeli Mossad agent who ran one of the assassination teams. Israeli officials have disavowed this book and its story from the beginning—as one would expect. Others who have researched the matter believe that his story is mostly true.

While “Munich” is based Jonas’s book with changes required by Spielberg’s ideology, if you want to see a dramatic movie based more closely on the Jonas book try “Sword of Gideon” [click HERE]. It is not as slick and stylish as a Spielberg film, with all the expensive production values he can command, it is the straight story of the book.

Spielberg’s and Kushner’s basic corruption of the story centers around the change in Avner’s feelings about the aims of the team’s mission. In the movie Spielberg contrives to throw Avner into a moral funk from which he cannot escape because he cannot see any moral difference between the act of murdering 11 innocent young men and the act of killing the murderers in a military action for the protection of other Israelis from future terrorist attacks. The Spielberg Avner shrinks from the mission on moral grounds.

The real Avner writes in the new edition of “Vengeance” in May 2005 (Spielberg, take note); “The fact is, our conceptions of morality have little power over terrorists. After all, the terrorists who killed the Israeli athletes in Munich (just like the terrorists who killed the thousands in the World Trade Center) regarded their actions as being profoundly moral—holy, even…. The fact is that there are real differences between us and the terrorists. When terrorists attack, they shed blood indiscriminately. Indeed, killing innocent people is often the point of what they are doing—either to send a message to those in power or to terrify the population at large….In stark contrast, when Israel exacts revenge for terrorist attacks—whether by sending out a team like mine after Munich or by launching an air-to-ground missile in the occupied territories after a car bombing—she aims to do it surgically, targeting only those responsible for the incident that triggered the mission….

“So it is that if I had to do it all over again, I would make the same choice I made when Golda Meir approached me more than thirty years ago. At the time—a time long before the Camp David Accords, a time long before any meaningful “peace process,”
a time when the entire Arab world (including Egypt and Jordan) was calling daily for the destruction of the Jewish state and Israel’s continued existence was very much an open question—responding in kind to the violence that had been visited on us was the only course that made sense.”

The question remains, is “Munich” Spielberg’s “Secret Masterpiece” as Time Magazine proclaims?

Spielberg’s gift—his ability to stay in touch with the Peter Pan inside his head—has earned him many billions of dollars. It has made him king of the world of kids, of the world of play and players, the king of make-believe. In the Neverland of Hollywood he has the power to realize any filmic wish he desires.

“Munich” might have been a “Secret Masterpiece” if he had allowed himself to tell the complex truth about the Jews and the Palestinians. Instead he turned it into another Indiana Jones. A serious work of art emerges from its characters and their conflicts. It is from these conflicts that plot develops. The plot of “Schindlers List” emerges from Schindler’s character. The reverse is true in “Munich.” The character does not come from a real person but from the requirements of the plot, just like Indy’s character is invented to suit the requirements of the plot.

Horsefeathers advises you to save your money for Indiana Jones Part 4, coming out next year. That’s something Spielberg really knows something about.

November 13, 2005

JARHEAD: THE BOOK & MOVIE

JARHEAD: THE BOOK

Anthony Swofford’s 2003 book “Jarhead” is not about the Gulf War or the Marine Corps, it is about Anthony Swofford’s fucked up head, as he would say, and his attempt to cure himself by joining the Marine Corps and then writing a book about it mostly blaming the Marine Corps for being a fucked up institution and fucking him and other fucked up young men up. Sometimes he was more fucked up, sometimes less—but, at any given time, it’s hard to tell which. He was about 18 when he joined the Marine Corps, and about 22 when he left the Corps and began his alcoholic, hippie-like wanderings. Eventually he got himself a college degree, took up writing, and got himself into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Eight and a half years out of the Marines he started to write “Jarhead.” At that time he wrote, “…no I am not mad. I am not well, but I am not mad…. As a lance corporal in a U.S. Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon, I saw more of the Gulf war than the average grunt. Still my vision was blurred—by wind and sand and distance…by stupidity and fear and ignorance, by valor and false pride….Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what I know.”

This explains why—this “blurred vision,” his metaphorical euphemism for being fucked up and seeing the world through his fucked up mind—so many former marines find “Jarhead” distant from their own Marine Corps experience. Two or three examples posted on Amazon will suffice:

B.D. TUCKER (ANNAPOLIS, MD):

As a Marine, a vet of the Gulf War, and a former infantry platoon commander with 1st Bn, 6th Marines (1/6), I lived in the Triangle area of the E. Province of Saudi Arabia, not too far from where Swofford's unit, 2/7, was originally located.

In struggling through the haphazard writing style in this book of purported non-fiction, I found Swofford's storyline problematic for a variety of reasons: poor research that is exhibited by his references to dates, locations, and events that at a minimum are inaccurate or did not occur when he says they did; a pervasively cynical attitude exhibited by the rank and file that I know exists, but that he asserts is rarely mitigated by infantry Marines displaying courage and integrity; the total absence of company and field grade officers who are respected by the rank and file and who are competent; the sheer incompetence of his battalion commander and the ignorance of the battalion staff; a questionable characterization of scout snipers roaming the desert during the ground combat phase of the Gulf War(I can't vouch for 2/7 or TF Grizzly, but at no time while I was ashore did our battalion or our regiment employ STA Marines in the manner that Swofford's unit does in the book); the almost complete breakdown in tactical discipline on the third day of the ground war by a rifle company of Marines in Swofford's battalion; and the near complete absence of positive leadership from Marine Staff COs and NCOs, save SSgt Sieck.

Throughout the book, Swofford careens from a crazed post adolescent desire to kill somebody in order to prove his mettle to a disprited and despondent pseudo-victim of the horrors of war, the worst of which he never sees or experiences, except in his unfulfilled fantasies. He says at the beginning that this story is "what I know", not what he remembers or how he remembers it. One is led to believe that what Swofford recounts actually happened. The further I read, the more convinced I was that Swofford was either shoveling a few loads of b.s for the liberal reviewers with no military experience who found this book so appealing as the voice of the common grunt, or that he actually believed the stuff he was writing about happened the way he said it did.

Throughout the book there are numerous passages of almost sublime writing that I wished would prevail over the abject negativity and darkness of this book. Although some of his descriptions were strained and confusing, he is a gifted writer, yet this book does not showcase his writing on a level of acclaim that supports the opinion of the majority of civilian reviewers. I respect Mark Bowden and many others who found Jarhead compelling, but hardly any of them ever served a day in uniform and do not bring that military perspective to the discussion.

I have never walked in Anthony Swofford's boots as a STA Marine in 2/7, but I have humped a ruck many klicks in the Arabian desert with some of the finest infantry Marines who I had the pleasure and privilege to lead, and not even the most cynical Marine among them ever came close to displaying the brooding selfishness and self loathing that Swofford exhibits in his book. He is, as he says, free to write what he wants about that war, its politics, and the Corps, warts and all, but he does not do the Corps, his fellow Marines, and especially himself any service by disparaging so many of them and depicting them as unintelligent stereotypes in this rant called Jarhead.

(I might add that I can count on one hand the number of times in my 13 year career that I have heard a fellow Marine, especially an enlisted Marine, refer to another as a "jarhead" and I have lived in a fighting hole within feet of my Marines….)

SGT. B. IVERS (FT. COLLINS, CO):

I roomed with Tony for a year or so. I was not with him in STA platoon during the Gulf war, I was there with G 2/7 2nd Platoon. I hooked up with STA 2/7 after the war. Tony is a nice enough guy and even then he had ambitions of becoming a teacher. Tony had fun off duty,he loved playing sports, drinking and finding girls to chase….. I read this book in Iraq in 2003. I remembered a lot about Tony. This book is about him and his view of what happened during his time in the Corp. I agree with many other reviewers that a lot is hyped and some stuff was fabricated. I can say that a lot of what he talks about happened but not perhaps as he remembered it.

Tony was not a school trained sniper. He spent very little time with a line company before testing and making STA platoon. The discipline problems in the platoon, when I got there in late 91 were serious…. We did have issues with morale in 2/7 during the Gulf War as over 80% of the battalion had just got out of boot camp, it was a real problem. But for every issue in that Battalion there were answers in the NCO leadership and people stepping up to the plate to get the job done. The whining in the book is excessive, and Tony had a tendency then, to do that.

The book is less about combat than it is about a young man trying to find himself, and this included the embellishments with it. To put this thing in perspective the gulf war was nothing compared to the 24/7 combat operations that are going on in Iraq and Afganistan now. For every Swofford there is a lot more squared away Marines who really believe in what they are doing, who are bleeding and dying for each other and their country.

The book is a confirmation to all liberals of their world view of the Marine Corp and our countries mission as being flawed. It is a sad work for any Marine who is and remains faithful to God Country and Corp….

The definitive book on the Gulf War awaits its author. This is not it. It was war as he knew it, not as it is, or was. Tony made it where he wanted to be, a professor and writer. He is making money from this thing, with the war going on, a continuation of the 3 day war he never got to fire a round in.

I did not like the book and I can't recommend it. Tony has issues, the book is his liberal agenda.

MARK A. ROCCO (DAYTON, OH):

Sorry to tell you all... but... Anthony Swofford is in need of some serious mental help. I was there, I was a Marine Grunt with India 3/9, Task Force Papa Bear for the first Gulf War. Swofford's novel (if you want to call it that) is soooooooooooooooooooo beyond fiction, tall tales, exaggeration, false bravado, and very likely the only truth from the book is that Swafford was smoking crack cocaine while writing it.

For others that were there, what a disgrace Swofford brings upon us with his book and NOW, someone is funding a movie of this trash.

…. Swofford's book is NOT about the psychology of men in combat. I'd say it's more about a man who needed help, and still needs help. One thing is for sure, Swofford would have never made it 60 days in MY Marine Corps as we would have identified him as unstable and untrustworthy right off the bat. Last, if he would have EVER pointed a weapon at me for any reason, I would have killed him before the sun went down that day. Does that sound tough? Macho? No one points weapons at other Marines and nothing happens about it. Of course for Super Marine, Anthony Swofford....... the guy who busts up bars and never gets charged, who can run all night till the sun comes up, who likes to french kiss the muzzle of his M16, chew/suck on bullets and cry about every 8 hours….

….Swofford doesn't just "get things mixed up." It's understandable to mix dates up, who was there and who wasn't, the name of a bar or the name of a town. We all do that due to memory and time gone by. This is to be expected and no foul called. BUT... Swofford's errors are calculated falsehoods. All veterans absolutely HATE the blowhard sitting at the bar telling embellished war stories (guess why kerry lost this election). Swofford is exactly to us what kerry was to the SwiftBoat Veterans. Just like the SwiftBoat Veterans, we just want the truth to be told. What I've listed above in my page by page tearing of his book is mostly stuff that we (Marines) know to be HUGE tall tales and BS. This stuff IS NOT stuff that gets mixed up in memory over time but stuff that someone has to intentionally create. The theme to all of this BS is absolutely someone puffing his chest out and playing hardass retard.

NOW.... I'm going to throw Swofford a bone as it's only fair. First, Swofford DOES accurately capture the drinking, whoring and brotherhood that the Marine Corps truly is. Most of us would agree with that no questions asked….

….Swofford may be a good writer, but his book could have been tweaked in many ways. The bottom line is that a large portion of the book is embellishment and it VERY MUCH turns off those of us that were there. There are enough TRUE stories and incidents from that era of the Corps and Desert Storm to write 100 books and make 10 movies but it's sad that Swofford's stuff may end up being the definitive reference of it all.

“Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what I know.” This disavowal of historical truth, as Horsefeathers hears it, is not an act of humility, a way of explaining one’s limitations. It is the proud expression of the transcendent artist who cannot be bothered worrying about mere historical truth when he can supply a higher, poetic truth. In fact both Swofford’s enlistment into the Marines and the writing of his “memoir” were attempts at self-cure and self-justification. And “Jarhead,” the ten year product of this process, still bears the stigmata of its origin.

Jarhead is a term that is essentially derived from the high, tight haircut that new enlistees get when they are inducted into the Marines. But the word has a special meaning for Swofford. It means misfit, fuck-up, loser, failure—any or all of the above. And in his narrative he makes clear, without real self-knowledge, that he was a jarhead long before he ever got to the Marines. In fact that was why he was eventually drawn unconsciously to the life of the grunt.

When he was seventeen he wanted to sign up for the Corps but his father refused to allow him to at that age. “My father knocked on my door….I tried to look angry rather than sad. ‘As soon as you can sign that contract on your own [17 ½], go ahead. Until then, I’m responsible for you. I’m not stronger than you, but I know some things about the military that they don’t show you in the brochures.’”

“I wept. What would I do with myself? I'd already, in my heart, signed the contract and accepted the warrior lifestyle. I wanted to be a killer, to kill my country's enemies. Now I'd have to take the SATs and visit colleges, I'd have to find a part-time job. I'd never live abroad and chase prostitutes through the world's brothels, or Communists through the world's jungles. I needed the Marine Corps now, I needed the Marine Corps to save me from the other life I'd fail at—the life of the college boy hoping to find a girl¬friend and later a job.”

Growing up he was too close and too attached to his mother, a chronically depressed woman who grieved her life away mourning for Swofford’s psychotically suicidal and institutionalized sister. By the time he was twelve he was full of fears and a misfit even at Boy Scout camp. “¬Before joining the Marine Corps I'd fired two weapons—a bow and arrow and a .22-caliber rifle, both at Boy Scout camp, at the age of twelve. If I hadn't requested to leave camp a week early, I would've also fired a shotgun and a larger-caliber rifle, but I missed my mother, had no friends at camp, the food was lousy, I was afraid of showering in public—actually, in the forest, the shower not a shower but half a dozen garden hoses draped over the lowest branches of a pine—and the leader of the camp was grouchy and probably a drunk. Because I cried-out a week early, and my parents lost the nonrefundable fee, I had to repay the money for the aborted second week. My mother supported me and my sweet rea¬soning behind quitting camp (that I missed her), but my father insisted I repay the money—my Boy Scout camp fees came from general family vacation funds, and to be fair to the rest of the family, members of the tribe who stayed the duration of their camps of choice, I had to reimburse my parents for the lost week. I don’t remember if I ever repaid this money, but I did miss the larger weapons, and for many years I felt inferior for never having fired a shotgun or large caliber rifle.”

His view of the Corps was no different from his jaundiced view of the pre-Jarhead world, only more concentrated: “I hated the Marines and I hated being a marine. I wore earrings while on leave and liberty, grew sideburns, hung out with gay navy guys who knew the best straight clubs anywhere—jarhead free clubs….”

His early roommates, Bottoms and Frontier “…were drunks and not the simple drunks who are concerned only with their own drunkenness, their own sad stupor, but social drunks, the poor bastards who feel it is their duty to fill every mouth in the house with drink. So nightly they filled me up….I was happy to drink with Frontier and Bottoms…[who were] dedicated to debasing the stan¬dards and policies of the institution… I enjoyed hearing their manifestos against the Corps, the Suck, as they called it, ‘… because it sucks the life out of you.’ After spending time around Frontier and Bottoms, I realized the grunt holds the Spiritual High Ground because he creates it; through constant bitching and inebriation he creates his own Grunt island, and the poor, sad, angry grunt on the outside is actually a happy and contented grunt on the inside, because he has been heard, someone understands his misery: through profanity and disgrace he has communicated the truth of his being….The constant clatter of the discarded liquor bottles and the cackles and howls from my roommates helped me forget that I'd made a mistake by joining the Corps.”

But he needed the Corps, the way an orphan of the storm needs a home: “I'd always worried about losing my home and running out of everything—out of love, money, food, shelter, and transportation. As a teenager I often suffered anxious daydreams of becoming homeless, out of a job, unskilled and unloved. I pictured myself on street corners, in the rain, with a filthy dog I couldn't afford to feed…. Obviously, these weren't the only reasons for my fear of homelessness:
my family was disintegrating because of my father's disinterest and infidelity, and I projected his emo¬tional distance many years further into my own life, when I too would become a lonely and despondent man.

“I joined the Marine Corps in part to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home…. The simple domesticity of the Marine Corps is seductive and dangerous. Some men claim to love the Corps more than they love their own mother or wife or children—this is because lov¬ing the Corps is uncomplicated. The Corps always waits up for you. The Corps forgives your drunken¬ness and stupidity. The Corps encourages your bru¬tality.”

And eventually, on his stumbling march to health he gains some degree of pride and maturity by learning the art of the scout/sniper, being able to deliver “a dime at a grand.” That is, the ability to shoot three shots at a target a thousand yards away so close together that they can be covered by a dime. A difficult and enviable skill to acquire.

Swofford leaves us in the dark about how he became a published writer. It is clear that he was able to outgrow some of his Jarheadedness, his anti-authoritarian rage, so that he could learn to write a publishable memoir/novel. And what better subject than turning his Marine experience into a copycat Viet Nam novel as though that were the real source of his rage and fears, perhaps another “The Things They Carried,” or “A Rumor of War.” Or better yet make it so bitter and full of “Fucking this and fucking that” and antinomianism that it can become another “Apocalypse Now,” or “Platoon.” And what better sources for gripping prose than the scene in which he puts the rifle barrel in his mouth ready to blow his brains out in desperation. Or the scene in which he is ready to blow the brains out of one of the members of his platoon. The only witness to either of these scenes is his long-dead best friend. (The friend did not die because of the war but because of drunk driving after leaving the Marines.)

There is much that is amateurish about the writing. You hear undigested bits of Hemingway, Kerouac, the plaintive voices of Holden Caulfield and Alex Portnoy, and even the Dostoyevskian sinner anti-hero. And there is much that is pretentious in the book, Swofford’s need to demonstrate to the reader that he is not really a retard by constantly referring to his intellectual preferences—Camus rather than porno magazines, or “The Iliad” rather than comic books, or “The Myth of Sysiphus,” or “The Works of Nietsche.”All of these he lugs over the Arabian desert to prove his intellectual manhood.

If only he could have stopped playing pretend Viet Nam and anti-war and allowed himself to see the comic aspects of the Gulf War, a war defined by Iraqi ineptitude and American overkill, a war in which he and his comrades killed no one, were never in danger, and were never injured, he could have written a painfully funny and true story. In fact he is quite good at the comedy of quotidian frustrations and stupidities of military life—his shitter detail, his running war with his dog-tags, his assignment as the Catholic lay reader of his outfit. He has a sharp eye for absurdity and a good ear for the comic if only he could get past his bitterness and pretensions.

JARHEAD: THE MOVIE

Reviewed by DI Sgt. A. Parody

This movie is one long piece of shit. It is made by fags, shitbags and possibly communists for morons. If you go to see this movie and you’re an American over fourteen, you’ll probably puke.

The whole point of the fucking movie is to show that marines are fuckheads, retards and killers who would kill anyfuckingbody. That they’re all fucking Calleys like at My Lai. This shitbucket of Hollywood fags has this idea about warriors, that they have no goddamn sense, and no fucking conscience. So they make this fucking movie where every marine fuckface can’t do anything but get drunk or think about fucking whores and shooting dead fucking shithead Iraqis.

So there’s this fucking retard hero, some jerkoff named Gyllenhaal who’s supposed to be Swofford. Now everybody in the Corps knows that Tony Swofford was mostly out of his fucking mind while he was in the Gulf. But not in this piece of shit movie. You see everything through his fucking eyes and he’s supposed to be sane, so you get the goddamn idea that what he sees is true. Now how is that for a puke-making idea. There is more shit in this movie than there is in a fucking cow pasture.

There are no goddamn officers shown who know what they’re fucking doing, so you get the idea that the fucking flies have taken over the fucking flypaper. It’s a fucking circus and there’s nobody in fucking command.

Not only that, these Hollywood buttfucking commies make up things that aren’t even in the goddamn book—forced hot branding, burning the flesh of fellow marine fucks.

Then they show, these fucks, an entire platoon going crazy during combat operations.

One crazy fuckhead threatening to kill another marine at point blank range with a loaded M16 in a rage, and then turning the weapon on himself and asking to be killed.

And stupidest of all there is a nonstop use of the "F" word throughout the whole fucking movie.

Don’t bother seeing this piece of shit.

October 05, 2005

HORSEFEATHERS GOES TO THE MOVIES: LORD OF WAR

The new movie, “Lord of War” is “Major Barabara meets “Leviathan.” Anyone with a deep respect for human nature and a yen for an intelligent movie, for a change, will enjoy Lord of War. It is a dark satire written and directed by Andrew Niccol, a native New Zealander of all things, about a young man who grows up in Brooklyn’s “Little Odessa,” surrounded by Russian gangsters and finds his road to the American Dream by becoming an arms dealer. Becoming increasingly successful, he ends up selling to anyone who is interested in buying guns, tanks, helicopters, grenades, whether they are good guys or bad.

Our hero, Yuri Orlov, played by Nicholas Cage, is not exactly a hero, but not exactly a villain either. He is in fact both devil’s advocate and choric figure, much like that great character in “Major Barbara,” the international arms dealer Sir Andrew Undershaft.

The film is a political satire and darkly comic when showing, in fascinating depth, the international arms market, an industry never shown in film in such detail before. It is one of those rare films that is all about morality but is not preachy or appears to take sides, so the viewer is left with space enough to come to his own unique moral resolution, but not without thinking about the matter long after the closing credits are gone from the screen.

The screenplay is clever, even witty at times, in the use of music, visual effects and even sound effects—for example in one sequence every time a shot is fired you hear a cash register ring. And Cage’s acting and narration is extra-dry, even brut—perfect for the astringent tone of the film. Despite the forces of good arrayed against him—his wife, his brother, the good guy Interpol policeman played by Ethan Hawke—only Yuri understands, intuitively, the truth of his position in the universe. Like Undershaft he is a “necessary evil.” And like Undershaft in “Major Barbara” and Satan in “Paradise Lost,” Yuri has all the best lines.

You must not come late to the film lest you miss a brilliant tour de force during the opening credits. In fact Lord of War is one of the smartest screenplays of the year. Andrew Niccol, the author, is the writer of such thought-provoking films as “Gattaca,” “The Truman Show,” and “S1m0ne,” in “Lord of War” he shows his wit and satirical gifts as well.

Of course, as one might expect, the movie was not well received by members of the liberal press. A case in point is the review in the New York Times of September 16, 2005 written by the Times’ arrogant, intellectually challenged second-string reviewer, Manohla Dargis. “The screenwriter for ‘Lord of War,’ Andrew Niccol, lavishes a great deal of time and many words building a case against guns; unfortunately, the film's director, who also happens to be Mr. Niccol, enjoys playing with toy guns. His words may say no, but his overworked, overslick visual style says lock and load, baby.
“…it can be hard to hear the message (if there even is one), especially when that message carries a familiar, been-there, done-that…moralism. Like: guns are bad, corporations are soulless, and some first world governments traffic in third world misery. To which any reasonably informed viewer might be expected to wonder, and your point is what, exactly?

“Mr. Niccol's point here, it appears, is both to entertain and to instruct with the story of Yuri, a Russian émigré who rises from humble Brooklyn to become a globe-trotting gunrunner with all the moral reasoning of a flea….”

It is difficult for Ms. Dargis to see the point because she knows but one morality, has a tin ear for irony and a stunted sense of humor. Her moral sensibilities are easily overpowered when she encounters ideas like the Hobbesian notion that given human nature, war is a universal aspect of life.

In any case, if you're looking for an entertaining, intelligent action movie that will give you something to think and talk about afterward—this is the one.

August 29, 2005

THE GREAT RAID: A REVIEW

Anyone who loves America and still believes, with all its imperfections, it is the best country in the world, the World War II generation is still the greatest, and who enjoys the lore of WW II, will love “The Great Raid.”

There aren’t very many of us left, apparently. After it opened a scant couple of weeks ago there was only one tiny theatre in all of Manhattan that was still showing it. It seems that it was much past its prime for current movie going audiences. It was surely the most politically incorrect movie I’ve seen in years. Not by design, but only because it focused on the verisimilitude of the story—and blacks, gays, and women struggling to find their way in a “white man’s world” were not part of this particular story.

I must confess, even as an amateur historian of World War II, who lived through it as an adolescent, I was not familiar with the story that this movie told: The rescue of 500 POWs from Cabanatuan, a homicidal Japanese prison camp not far from Manila, in January 1945. The film is based on the facts that appear in two recently published books: “The Great Raid on Cabanatuan” by William B. Breuer, and “Ghost Soldiers” by Hampton Sides.

It is not clear why such a terrific story has not been celebrated before this time, sixty years on. But, whatever the reason, it is a terrific story and deserves to be told, especially because there are so few still around who are interested. The story goes something like this:

Toward the end of 1944, orders came from the Japanese high command to execute the prisoners of war held by the Japanese. It is not clear how many were killed in cold blood, but it is known that 120 were burned alive on Palawan. And it was feared that the 500 men being held in Cabanatuan, survivors of the the Bataan Death March in 1942, would meet the same fate after MacArthur’s return to the Phillipines in 1944.

Hurriedly, a Ranger company of about 120 men was dispatched to rescue the POWs in Cabanatuan. And as it turned out, all of the men were saved, with very few casualties amongst the rescuers. It turned out to be one of the great rescue missions in modern military history.

One shouldn’t expect this to be in the same class of WW II movies as the really great ones—“The Bridge on the River Kwai” or “The Great Escape”—it is not. It is a low budget movie, without compelling actors, a script that is too earnest and unimaginative cinematically, and burdened by an unnecessary romance. But the last 30 minutes are well worth the price of admission, especially the documentary footage. It will touch you and make you want to cheer once more for the greatest generation.

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