Security Theatre

I haven't protested being patted down every time I enter the Target Center or the Metrodome for the last several years. I have protested the women who carry their wallets in a suitcase under their arm and stop the line for several minutes as security inspects the three hairbrushes, entire make-up case, change of clothes and Winnie the Pooh blanket they thought they might need in case of extra innings. Ironically the many women I know who are actually serious people who do things on their own and actually pay for stuff don't carry a duffel bag for a purse, the ones who do don't even need ID since buying drinks is kind of a Honeydew thing. Or shoes, but I digress. I take terrorism in the modern world seriously, and never more so than at the Metrodome where typical poor Minnesota infrastructure design creates ripe conditions for mass panic and I believe that even a small event could lead to many people being trampled to death or falling over railings, and a stadium disaster worse than Heysel or Hillsborough. I have also noted before that when going to Twins games, my general anxiety is not centered around Osama bin Laden but rather the prospect of meeting that guy who rides the #14 bus with a machete. So after making it through security to last night's game, I sit down in my seat and start filling in the line-ups on my scorecard, when two things strike me as odd. One is that Kent Hrbek has been called out of retirement to bat clean-up for the ailing Twins, and the other is that the guy in front of me is shaving with a knife. The Hrbek thing was down to filling in the numbers from the wrong line-up and not realizing #14 was batting clean-up for the Black Sox, not the Twins. But bang-up #@&$'ing job to the security guys and ushers who hassle me all the time, but let this guy shave and pick his teeth with a knife in the seat in front of me. Did nobody besides me see Robert de Niro's knife-throwing, shaving his legs with a hunting knife antics in The Fan? Okay, I actually know the answer to that question. It was only a little knife, and I try not to treat tools as totems (hence my defense of the 2nd amendment), and really, even if this 65 year old man went on a killing spree, with A.J. Pierzynsk 50 feet away I wasn't going to be his first target, but I still wanted him to put it away, because it's bizarre behavior to shave and pick your teeth with a knife in public, and invites speculation on what other abnormal, antisocial behavior he's capable of.

The other piece of security theater that I came across after the game was a story on how the Mooninite Crisis in Boston has sparked federal legislation aimed at terror hoaxes. As any sensible person would expect, this is already illegal, so now the Senate is making it... more illegal I guess, with longer jail terms, but also allowing the government to file civil suits to recover the costs of dealing with hoaxes. Which sounds reasonable, because as I said about the Metrodome, creating a panic could be more dangerous than the predicate event. The odd thing is, especially if this is really in response to the Mooninite event, the government already showed they have the power to do that by getting twin $1m settlements for the city of Boston and Homeland Security, and just wants to broaden their powers to sue people for their own mistaken overreactions. To explain the Mooninite Crisis, first let me give a little perspective: the city of Boston once put down a traffic monitor, a rubber tube leading into a box chained to a lamppost, as seen all the time in major cities, and then another branch of the Boston government blew it up thinking it was a bomb, so they're maybe a little jumpy. Across ten American cities, an advertising firm started a guerrilla marketing campaign putting up blinking LED boards with images of Mooninites giving people the finger (think obscene Lite-Brite) to promote the film Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters. In nine cities, nobody cared. In Boston, nobody cared for the first two weeks they were up, then somebody saw a blinking cartoon character giving them the finger from the underside of a bridge and thought Al Quaeda had abandoned secrecy and joined forces with the Cartoon Network. The firm already paid out $2m to reimburse Boston and DHS, and the guys who put these up (and put the footage of them putting the Mooninite LEDs up on Youtube, which to the best of my knowledge bomb-makers rarely do beforehand) are still facing criminal charges for Boston's overreaction, because now, presuming on other people's intelligence and emotional stability is illegal.

There is a line to be drawn, for instance the guys who tried to create a disturbance on a plane by doing everything short of violence to make people believe they were terrorists created a dangerous situation in a confined area, as well as seriously inconveniencing a lot of people and tying up security and airport infrastructure. The guy trying to intimidate me with his machete and tales of racial oppression before asking for money, he's also on the far side of the line, because he engaged with me repeatedly when I tried to brush him off. The guy with the knife at the game last night annoyed the crap out of me, but he and the Mooninite instigators don't deserve anything more than a warning to quit fucking around and scaring people, because when the little grey cells are turned to the problem instead of the tightening cardiac muscles, neither was setting out to cause a panic. If Metrodome security had dived over me without warning to tackle and taser Johnny Pocketknife last night, I'd have considered that more intrusive to my well-being than my solution: I went the passive-aggressive Minnesota way and made comments loud enough for him to hear about security theatre, patting me down but waving through the guy who shaves with a knife in public, and his embarrassed wife made him put his knife away.

Really, when even Saturday Night Live is poking holes in airport security, is it anything more than theatre? As SNL's TSA sketch pointed out, since the last successful suicide attack on an American plane involved multiple people, limiting everyone to three ounces of liquid is kind of pointless, since five people can combine theirs into a whole pint. In a nation founded on the will and principle of the common man to act in his own defense against tyranny, maybe it should be obvious by now that a vigilant, engaged, and rational public, and not DHS or the United States Coast Guard, is what has to protect us from the creeping, machete-wielding darkness. According to our government, we should particularly remain vigilant against the espionage poppy coins an oil-rich foreign power is planting on unsuspecting Americans, to track our people and spy on our way of life, especially when they're just a quick canoe trip across Lake of the Woods from coming to get us here in Minnesota. Just like the Cold War, our enemy comes stealthily clad in red, but this time instead of proffering a little red book this time it's a little red poppy on a coin, and a red maple leaf on a flag. Keep your powder dry and an eye on the North Star.

Children of Men

I really felt overwhelmed by Children of Men, I really did, and I was amazed on reflection to realize it's really down to one technical factor that raises a good dystopian thriller into something transcendent. Much of the film is shot in incredibly long, fluid takes following Theo Faron (Clive Owen), often as he moves through a variety of locations. Because Theo's world is so large and fluid and I was never shown the seams, it felt incredibly real. At several points Theo passes by or eavesdrops on the rest of the cast as he walks into earshot of conversations, so there is a definite sense that the world around him continues without him, like the of the reverse Truman Show(1). The cumulative effect is to make Theo and his world, and everyone in it, seem so real that I was completely absorbed into the story, to the point of feeling the crawling grief of Theo's world, and feel the warm spark when he glimpses something brighter. The exploding coffeeshop clip from the opening used to promote the film packs this surprising punch because the long, intimate shot of Theo captures so well his feeling of “I was just there.”

The themes of the film when presented in that manner take on a greater significance, and they take on a range of issues, from the obvious authoritarianism and xenophobia, to a more general malaise of despair in a culture that sees no future for itself, to the fleeting nature of the transcendent, unifying moments we experience as a culture. The general premise of the film is that no children have been born in the world in 18 years, without any explanation, and the looming extinction of the human race has created a climate of overwhelming depression. When the first pregnancy is introduced into this world in almost two decades, the effect is briefly overwhelming on those around the mother, before politics set in and protecting her becomes secondary to exploiting her. In particular there's an image in this film of soldiers kneeling penitently before the child before resuming fighting in an Iraq-like wrecked urban landscape, which evoked the fleeting effects of both Christ and 9/11 of turning our focus to something higher than our usual squabbles ourselves, before both were exploited.

I can be biased by the fact that I love a few of the actors in this film, and Clive Owen and Julianne Moore both do well, as does Chiwetel Ejiofor in a supporting role that needed the depth of feeling he brings to it. Michael Caine, however, who is having a very good year, steals a lot of his scenes playing an John Lennon-inspired aged hippie. So my response may have been exceptional, but the only other film I've seen this year that moved me as much as Children of Men was The Depahted.

1 - Technically that would be the real world, but I suppose I was referring to the way that The Truman Show was about constructing an obviously fake, idealized world that let people escape their own lives and carefully protected its audience through panning away from Truman's sex life, letting imagination substitute where our romantic ideals get... sticky. Truman being a real person makes him an anchor to ease the suspension of disbelief even though the parameters of Truman's world are laid out as fake, and Children of Men does the opposite. Alfonso Cuaron makes the world around his actors seem real, and ties it into our own through careful references to media imagery from Abu Ghraib, The Green Zone, and Guantanamo, to give a few, and to some of our most profound real and fictional nightmares through references to Orwell, Auschwitz, and others. So Cuaron has Clive Owen's stomping around in the world I brought into the theater but lured me in with a premise that keeps the story at a safe distance (global infertility, decades into the future).

Joyeux Noel, and the dangerous subversiveness of Christmas

It's quite a thing, this film about small acts of kindness, and that fraternal spirit in all human beings that lets us recognize each other despite differences in language or skin color... well some of us anyways. It's about the Christmas spirit, and the way all that for one night and one day, we can all stop caring about the problems of this world and care more about each other. For a little while. Maybe because of that, there was an overwhelming feeling of sadness for me watching this film, knowing what had to happen when Christmas was over.

Joyeux Noel is a story inspired by the events in Europe on December 24th, 1914, when all up and down the western front, soldiers of all nationalities came up out of their trenches to share Christmas together. The story some of the survivors told was of singing Silent Night and hearing across no man's land other soldiers singing Silent Night, or Douce Nuit, or Stille Nacht, and realizing they had far more in common than what separated them. They were all young men far from their loved ones, likely to die in the mud without seeing home again, whose individual lives didn't amount to much beyond moving a border a few yards back and forth. So they took a break from killing each other and played football in the snow between the trenches, until it was time to go back. Soldiers exchanged letters for family in occupied territory, showed each other pictures of their children, made plans to see each other again after the war, and wished each other well.

The film focuses on the subversive effect of that kind of contact between people, when all these soldiers gathered together singing Christian songs, in need of both physical and spiritual. German, French, and Scottish, they all gather together for a mass said by a Scottish minister. The mass is said in Latin, appealing to one of the connections between these men, a spiritual authority that operates independent of the authority of governments, that no longer belongs to any single language, or culture, or people. The subversive effect of Christians acting like Christians, forgiving and loving their neighbors, is not lost on the powers that be, that have to present their own version of doctrine and reframe genocide as holy work against an inhuman horde. As one commander says in the aftermath, you can't execute 200 men, recognizing that if the entire mass of soldiers dying on the front lines were to stop hating the enemy, there would instantly be no war for the generals to direct and with which to inspire the public.

This is what's so sad about Joyeux Noel, is knowing that the truce didn't continue, that those who weren't on the front line on Christmas Eve did restore order, and that most of the men who took a risk and climbed out of their trench were buried somewhere on that same field. The final image of the film is heartbreaking, German soldiers shut up in a box car being sent off to the Russian Front where they will have a fresh set of strangers to kill, far from the friends they made on Christmas Eve. As the train leaves, they hum the song the Scottish soldiers taught them, "I'm Dreaming of Home". There is a powerful image, Germans in a box car (with their Jewish lieutenant), being sent off to die in a bloodbath that killed an entire generation of men, making the point that this genocide was no more noble than any other.

I was also struck by the opening, with children in three countries reciting wartime rhetoric in a classroom like a book report. There's something very curious about how we sometimes only recognize the grotesqueness in our public discourse from our children, when it's wrong for them to repeat what the views of their elders. Jon Stewart has exploited this to great effect with the children reading transcripts of political pundits arguing on TV, undressing everything the way only children can, where there is no excuse of hyperbole or point of view, and we must decide if we believe these things to be true, before passing them on as fact.

It is an uplifting film, even in its sadness, for reminding us of what kind of people we should like to be at Christmas, if we can't do it the rest of the year. It was made by French filmmakers last year, and it's nice to see despite the animosity towards the French over the war in Iraq some of them found it in their hearts to tell a story about soldiers far from home, when so many American and British soldiers are spending Christmas in hellish conditions. God bless them all and keep them safe.

Mass Media, September 11th, and the War on Terror

Five years on, mainstream films are being made about 9/11, and Flight 93 and World Trade Center were touted by mainstream news media as films that were just so Important that everybody had to see them to keep America strong. I didn't see either one because I watched the towers burn on live TV before going to class, and all critical reviews of both films emphasized the fact that both films had nothing to add, and nothing to say. The point was just to relive the experience as vividly as possible, and immerse oneself in the emotional reaction we all had that day. Some call that post-traumatic stress disorder, Fox News calls it patriotism.

What really makes the idea of safe, saccharine, didactic reenactments irritating to me is that since 2003 There has been an entire television show about what happened to America in the five years since September 11th, and now it's turned more consciously to the occupation of Iraq. It deals with religious fanaticism, a war for the survival of an entire culture, civil liberties in the time of war, suicide bombers, torture, and generally the question of what it means to remain human in a confrontation with evil. Fortunately, most people haven't figured it out, otherwise they'd be freaking out. It's Battlestar Galactica, and it's about the smartest thing on television.

The other thing I've seen recently that was also thought-provoking and therefore anathema to propaganda-hungry audiences was Paradise Now. That was a Palestinian film about two childhood friends who are sent out together on a mission as suicide bombers, but become separated. Watching the two of them decide what to do in the face of this, and what is revealed about their motivations and the environment that produces this is incredible. It doesn't make nearly enough of a moral judgment in its treatment of its protagonists to qualify as appropriate viewing material in America, but man was that a good movie. I was surprised that it got beat out by Tsotsi for the Oscar, and I wonder how much of that was politics, although Tsotsi was pretty fucking fascinating as well. In case anybody's wondering, that's the story of a South African thug who shoots a woman during a carjacking and then finds her baby still in the backseat. Both fascinating, both better than Crash.

Victimization and terrorism finally come full circle

I'm starting to wonder what the next evolution of American culture is going to be, since I would like to think the whole oppressed victim thing is beginning to grow beyond its practical limits. When everybody's a victim, maybe it finally looks stupid and counterproductive. It seems like a strange thing to aspire to, but every public figure who stumbles seems to dig their way out by attacking those who exploit their failures, or even just the people who point them out, which is somehow worse then screwing up in the first place. The real benefit of being a victim, though, is the relaxation of ethics.

Remember ten years ago when terrorism was a set of unethical methods of warfare, and BAD? Then everybody slowly started becoming a terrorist: first all our enemies, then everything harmful thing like child pornography became linked to terrorism, then any opposition to the administration's mandate became linked to terrorism. Finally there were logical inconsistencies in the definition, whereby Franklin Roosevelt, the Founding Fathers, and the Minutemen would all be caught up in the wave of terrorism spreading throughout history. Michael Collins and the IRB used to be invoked as an example of ambiguity of perspective, because they created urban guerrilla warfare and over the next 50 years the organization evolved into the Provisional IRA, who were indisputably a terrorist organization, but now there weren't any fine distinctions to be made.

And that's when the ethical lines needed to blur a bit more, and we all realized there's no moral judgment applied to the actions of terrorists, it's about their goals. FDR and Francis Marion may not have followed the rules of war, but it's okay because they were on the right side. "History is written by the winners" and "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" used to be about bias and distortion, but now they're quoted as proof that emotional perspective is not subject to logical observation. The KKK may have been terrorists, but a guy who bombs abortion clinics to spread fear is doing God's work, not terrorism. Then something even scarier happened, when method and ethics stopped mattering, the label stopped mattering so much, and now even the Good Guys are terrorists too. The Founding Fathers now were terrorists, just like the Iraqis, and we don't have to justify Dresden or Nagasaki.

Don't believe me? Christian kids are going to camps which justify themselves by invoking terrorism. The director of the bible camp Kids on Fire says, “I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places because, excuse me, we have the truth.” I don't care if she thinks they have the truth, I just care that the fact that somebody is brainwashing boys into blowing themselves up on the West Bank somehow means we have to do it too? Their stated goal is to take back America for Christians, and they pop balloons that say "government" on them as part of some exercise to identify their enemies. Then they all pray in front of a cardboard cut-out of... the president. Here's the thing, they have to be victims of an oppressive wave of secular culture that's out to destroy them, and they have to be losing. Government is the enemy, but somehow President Bush is not part of that, because he's a victim too.

My favorite though for the special ethical status of victims is the way for instance, women apparently identified with Kathy Bates breaking a man's ankles in Misery because even if it was a psychotic act of violence, it was still empowering. And it's not so ridiculous, the pervasive sugar-and-spice myth does make life that much worse for everybody, and it can take an image like a psychotic female stalker to make us even aware of it. What's weird though is being able to be proud of it somehow, like only being able to respond emotionally to the politics, and again you have to put aside any ethical or moral response. Sure it's fun to threaten the ruling class, but it's not so much fun when everybody's a victim, because then you get things in the same vein like Sen. George Allen saying he had a Confederate flag, a picture of confederate soldiers, and a noose in his office because of his rebellious youth. Invoking slavery and lynchings while governor of a southern state is certainly rebellious to common decency. My favorite though are these t-shirts from Aryan Wear, modeled here by white supremacist folk singers Prussian Blue.

They claim they're all about pride, not hatred, but can invoke mass murder on a scale so large as to have permanently changed institutions throughout the western world, and it works, because now they really are the victims of hatred, mine. Seriously, the sight of them does make me angry, but fortunately, I'm not a terrorist, and I don't care what they wear or sing or where they do it, I just worry about who's dumb enough to listen.