... perversions of the teachings of Jesus that condemn young women to assaults on their bodies and their self esteem by men empowered by church authority.
The filmmaker, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, has followed up on her best selling book Jesus and John Wayne by collecting these testimonies on film. It's well worth the time of all of us, even if not part of this religious tendency or any religious tendency. This is a short [29 minutes] video that unmasks the intense misogyny which goes along with Christian nationalism and abuse of power. You don't have to be evangelical to know about that.
I am reminded of what South African women sang against apartheid: "You have struck a woman; you have struck a rock ..."
On May 17, 1968, nine Catholic activists appropriated 378 files about young, male, potential draftees from the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. They burned them in the parking lot and stood by until arrested. From jail, the group sent an apologetic letter and a basket of flowers to the clerk on duty at the office during the event. Found guilty of destruction of U.S. property, Mary Moylan, Philip Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan and George Mische failed to report for the beginning of their sentences. The men were eventually captured and served time; Moylan escaped the Feds until 1979 and then served one year. (Perhaps they had a hard time finding the girl?)
The Catonsville actions touched off many additional religiously rooted demonstrations of resistance to war among white dissidents, many involving property destruction and non-cooperation with authorities. At first these responded to the Vietnam War, later to nuclear weapons development and nuclear stockpiles. White, activist, Catholic religious witness for peace acquired a new foothold in the American religious miscellany.
At the time, the property destruction and non-cooperation were extremely controversial among more traditional peace activists. Catholic pacifist groups did not universally applaud the Catonsville actions. Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker deplored property destruction and especially the resisters' failing to show up for imprisonment -- though of course she delightedly hosted Fr. Daniel Berrigan saying mass when he emerged from Danbury Federal Prison a couple of years later.
Quite properly, people who engage in serious nonviolent actions still ponder whether their tactics accord with their vision of a more peaceful world.
In the publication Waging Nonviolence, Phil Berrigan's daughter Frida, an activist in her own right, offers a fascinating review/discussion of a film dealing with these issues in our contemporary setting. The depredations of the fossil fuel industry attract activists who are willing to put their bodies on the line to interrupt the carnage being let loose on our one and only planet. Is there a way, both ethical and effective, to protest our own destruction?
“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a different kind of climate catastrophe movie. There is no zombie horde, no nuclear-infused, super-sized gorilla, no metaphorical asteroid standing in for the end of the world. ... In this film (and in our lives) the wasteland is here and now. It is killing some people and making life uncomfortable or unlivable for the protagonists and their families. One character, Theo, has a cancer that leaves her gaunt and coughing up blood. She can’t afford the medicine. In a telling moment, a few of the team are at Dwayne’s West Texas home looking over maps. His wife offers beer. Shawn asks for water instead, but she replies: “We’re out of water,” without sentiment or apology. “Beer it is, then.” It is just a fact. Like the exposure to chemical plants and constant truck exhaust responsible for the bloom of rare cancer in Theo, or the heat wave that killed Xochitl’s mother.
These young people have had enough. They find one another and try to do something they hope will have an immediate and lasting impact on the companies that profit from polluting the planet. They are careful and methodical in their planning and take pains to avoid violence to human beings or more pollution to the Earth. The young people repeatedly put themselves in danger rather than risk others getting hurt. And they have all the discussions you’d expect a group of thoughtful, impassioned, young climate activists ...
... For my parents and their community of Plowshares activists, faith and friendship answered the questions and soothed the doubts. And I felt the absence of those two saving elements in this film.
You want the recipe for risky property-damaging actions? In my experience, it is faith that your actions are a few stitches in a larger tapestry of change-making, as well as friendships that fill your commissary and mailbox and protect you from the kinds of nasty deals the FBI tries to exact.
The closest to a real-life pipeline blower-upper I know is Jessica Reznicek, and she was sentenced to eight years in prison in June 2021. Once she’s done with that sentence, she will have to navigate three more years of probation and will owe more than $3 million in restitution to Energy Transfer LLC. She needs a lot of support to get through this next decade of prison and probation, and there is nothing in the film on how to do that.
... I am going to take all the activist energy stirred up in me by “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” and put it toward writing [and supporting] to Jessica Reznicek.
I can't see myself searching out the movie. Not my idea of fun. But I do support Reznicek. More about her offense here.
I am always stirred by encountering communities of resistance whose members question themselves as they search for ways to act for more justice and more peace.
We streamed LUNANA: A YAK IN THE CLASSROOM this week. Nominated for an Oscar as Best International Feature Film, the movie tells the story of a young Bhutanese teacher dispatched, over his objections, to the most remote school in the country, a 10 day hike into the Himalayan foothills. His electronic devices go dead, keeping a fire burning requires collecting yak dung, and the school doesn't even have a blackboard. But the children turn out to be bright and eager to learn, the village leader's daughter teaches him to appreciate the magic of this remote valley, and even to how to get along with Norbu, the yak who lives in the classroom. Too soon, the teacher leaves this beautiful place, returns to accomplish his urban dream of emigrating to Australia -- and realizes that he may have left behind something vital.
Sounds trite, doesn't it? And maybe it is. The actors are beautiful and the scenery majestic. The film was an unalloyed joy to watch.
Yet I realized overnight that the film had stayed with me; there's depth in it.
I had the privilege of traveling in Bhutan in 2013. It was a fascinating place: a constitutional monarchy with a governing parliament, chosen by elections that international observers characterize as largely free and fair. The state aims to give all Bhutanese young people a modern education. In a country with many local dialects, all students learn English along with Dzongkha. Education promotes Western science; urban dwellers are plugged in citizens of the world. Yet Bhutan is also trying to keep its distinctive Buddhist culture alive and flourishing. Professional life is carried on in traditional dress; politicians compete to promote "Gross National Happiness" as well as security, health, and prosperity.
None of this is easy to balance. People we encountered in 2013 openly discussed whether the balance -- old and new, capitalist and cooperative, scientific and spiritual -- that makes Bhutan feel unique could be sustained. The tiny kingdom sits between Indian and China, both seeking influence. It has a Nepali minority who are very poorly treated. And if Bhutanese are really free, will they continue to want to preserve the national way of life?
These questions are the subject of Lunana. The filmmakers don't bash you over the head with them, but they are all there to ponder amid the gorgeous scenery. Highly recommended.
It seems likely that the Democrats bringing the case against Donald Trump will try to make the impeachment trial just that. We live in a time when, apparently, there's always a video clip. Mostly I hate video, but I'm sure I'll be curious enough to watch some of it.
I'm slightly skeptical about this, but the historian Heather Cox Richardson thinks it will be a powerful visual story:
Democrats are operating from a position of strength. It seems likely they will use the impeachment trial to explain to the American people what happened on January 6. Using videos and the words of those who were in the Capitol when the mob stormed in, they will paint a picture of an attempted coup, incited by a former President of the United States.
At Just Security, Justin Hendrix took a look at the challenges of of turning social media and other visual evidence into a narrative. If House managers (impeachment speak for prosecutors) do a good job, he thinks they can use the visual evidence of January 6 to set the historical frame in which these events are remembered. This could be more significant than the Senate verdict.
Certainly, the video evidence will represent a curious portrait of the various forces motivating the base of the Republican party at this moment in history. The participants in the siege on the Capitol represented “a really fascinating cross section of America, and I hope some of the coverage in the future will focus on that. I mean, there was a pride flag being flown from the inaugural scaffoldings really early on, and a Trump flag flying next to these America First and quasi-fascistic flags. I think it’s just such a fascinating insight into a pretty significant section of America and a pretty significant section of the Republican party,” said Higgins.
“Oftentimes the value of these processes is less about the final decision that’s made, because those are often steered by politics, than it is about actually correcting historical narrative, and educating a broader public about what took place relative to a particular event. The impact of something like this should go far beyond the decision. The last time we had an impeachment trial, the House came in with the best evidentiary record, a record that you cannot question in any way, shape or form and given the votes, and given the politics they could not get a conviction. But you do this for the public, you do it for the country, you do it for democracy,” said Matheson.
Apparently this was how the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials of high ranking Nazis in 1945-6 thought about film. On the one hand, they wanted the content of the proceedings widely distributed on newsreels and therefore set up the courtroom for filming. And additionally, they created movies that showed Nazi crimes vividly and evoked visceral horror even among the defendants. These were widely distributed in theaters, setting the narrative of that atrocity-filled era.
The British Imperial War Museum (an oddly pacifistic leaning institution whose viewpoint may suggest how history can be revised after imperial decline) offers a short film about the Nuremberg video evidence.
"Look, we shouldn’t have had the election on Tuesday," she said. "It was an untenable decision (on whether to vote), but the people of the state of Wisconsin rose up.
State Republicans thought they'd sewed this one up by forcing voters to either navigate a bureaucratic maze to receive an absentee ballot or venture into hours-long lines to cast an in-person vote at inadequate polling sites. But voters risked their lives to have their say. Notably, in Milwaukee where COVID is mowing down Black citizens, Karofsky ran up a 68-32 percent victory. Her urban and southern margins overwhelmed rural GOP voters. The map of the vote looks a lot like the party distribution of Wisconsin votes before former governor Scott Walker and his merry band of Republican voter suppressors took over the state after 2010. Let's just hope no brave voters pay for this one with their lives!
Next door in Michigan, mid-west voters show how to get it done
Katie Fahey thought there must be something wrong with her state's elections. No matter who won the overall state totals, Republicans always seemed to control the legislature. The 27 year old program coordinator for the Michigan Recycling Center realized the boundaries of their districts had been gerrymandered so the GOPers couldn't lose. So she wrote on Facebook: "I'd like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan. If you're interested in doing this as well, please let me know." Next thing she knew she was leading a citizen group that called itself Voters Not Politicians. After holding 33 local meetings to assess support, they took advantage of Michigan's initiative process to write a law requiring an independent redistricting commission to perform the line-drawing process. Political professionals scoffed. Four thousand volunteers collected over 425,000 (no paid petitioning here!) and put the measure on the ballot for 2018. After court challenges and a tough campaign, the measure prevailed in the November election and so far has withstood repeated Republican-inspired judicial review.
The documentary Slay the Dragon tells the story of Fahey, her associates, the Voters Not Politicians campaign -- and, moreover, how Republican gerrymandering has shaped politics in the upper midwest. Gerrymandering is both simple and brutal, enabling winners to design their own impregnable districts, and also technical, an exercise in big data manipulation and legal fancy footwork. This story makes the process and its grossly undemocratic implications broadly understandable. It offers a remarkable picture of what people feeling a moral imperative can do against powerful, fully funded opponents, including ones wearing judicial robes. One of the elections professionals interviewed here offered a summary which I think applies; when it comes to preserving democracy against greed and the power-hungry,
"We have to be our own saviors."
...
I've been following the Voters Not Politicians effort since December 2017, so there was little in this I didn't know. Yet I found the film intellectually satisfying and emotionally gripping, despite running over an hour and half which seem long for something so full of talking heads. This is a very professional project. It's available on YouTube, Amazon, and other streaming platforms. Highly recommended.
Friends online, seeking to contextualize the El Paso massacre, pointed to this PBS documentary. (I snagged it from Netflix, but it is readily available in many outlets.)
It's a good, thorough, narrative of the sequence of events -- the ATF storming of Ruby Ridge, the incineration of the Waco Branch Davidians -- that formed the 1990s catalogue of government offenses that right wingers used to justify organizing in violent militias and, eventually, the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma's federal building. That domestic terrorist act killed 168 people, of whom about 100 were low level government employees and many of the others children in a daycare center. The film asks an all too contemporary question.
How could somebody get to that state in their life where they would be so angry and upset they would do something like this?
Joe Hersley, FBI agent
The perpetrator, Tim McVeigh, wanted to start the "next American revolution." A disgruntled failed soldier who loved guns, he drifted into neo-Nazi circles and became convinced that "the only way government is going to get the message is with a body count ..."
In the film, that indefatigable researcher of the right-wing, Leonard Zeskind, answers what we are now asking about El Paso suspect Patrick Crusius: was McVeigh some kind of sick sociopath, or did he come out of an identifiable right wing milieu?
There was no massive conspiracy, that much is true, but the idea that Timothy McVeigh was a lone killer, that is wrong headed. because it absolves the movement from which it all sprang. Timothy McVeigh was not on his own, he was the creation fo the white supremacist movement. He carried the Turner Diaries around and read it to people. He lived at the gun shows. He met neo-Nazis ... and the idea that there was no connection between the white supremacist movement and the events in Oklahoma City is patently false. There was a strong connection ...
And now we have a president who vibes with white nationalists ...
The former Special Counsel is expected to testify before House Judiciary and House Intelligence Committees this Wednesday. He has made clear that he will not enlarge on his findings as expressed in the report delivered in March.
But how many of us have read this 400 page document? Not many of us.
In The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts, playwright Robert Schenkkan has adapted the words of the report for a staged reading at the Riverside Church that took place on June 24. An all-star cast led by John Lithgow as Trump performs the legal phrasings with energy and even some laughs. After all, the Trump entourage are clowns as well as knaves and wanna-be gangsters. Lithgow's rendition of the raging Trump is sometimes funny -- until you remember this guy is president and shows every sign of wanting to use the power of his office to harm his enemies.
This performance is well worth a little more than an hour of your time. Stick with it, let it roll over you and sink in, and then ponder again what you are doing to make sure the Orange Crook is a one term president.
If you are wondering why Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is not intimidated to find herself at odds with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this film is for you. She's seen her fill of old, entrenched, white liberal women who don't recognize their time may be coming to an end.
If you wonder how Congresswoman Omar bears up under racist bullying by Donald Trump and friends, this film is for you. She's survived plenty of vicious attempts to squelch her. Trump's demand she "go back" somewhere won't stop her. She has a community and a home.
If you are curious about the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party's hyper-participatory caucus nominating process, this is a great introduction to its potential. (Here's my commentary from a year when there was less obvious potential.)
If you have ever wondered what I mean on this blog when I declare someone running for office has become a "good candidate," Congresswoman Omar conducts a master class in meet, greet, and near-magical charisma in this film.
If you want an inspiring picture of a people-powered campaign that wins, this film is for you.
Time for Ilhan is available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Google Play.
This film, now playing, is San Francisco in its foggy vagaries, absurd curiosities, and wrenching beauty. It's true fiction from and about the city's shrinking Black population. See it if you have a chance. I cried and you might too. The movie will run for awhile here I'm sure, but will it play elsewhere?
...
The story of African American displacement in San Francisco has clear through-lines. Southern Black people migrated to the Bay to work in war industries in the 1940s from the South, Louisiana and Texas prominently. Many more settled in the East Bay than here, but a community scraped out a foothold. Redlining confined Black residents to decaying "inner city" enclaves. In these neighborhoods, vibrant Black churches, businesses, and culture thrived, centered especially in the Fillmore District. This cluster was decimated by "urban renewal" -- aka "Negro removal" in the 1950s and 60s. The Black population as a proportion of all residents peaked at 13 percent in 1970 and is now down to under five percent, as residents have been forced out by rising housing prices and a declining market for a less-educated labor force. The closest thing we have to a Black neighborhood is bits of the Bayview, once home of the shipyards and now poisoned by industry's toxic droppings. These days, expensive condos built where once San Francisco sited its waste dump are raising prices even in this last holdout of African Americans.
It's a crazy, ugly picture -- too much tech cash is chasing too little land and too little living space on a naturally gorgeous peninsula. No wonder people want to live here, but "here" is a rapidly changing, violently discriminatory, reality.
People who read this blog may know that I am also Walking San Francisco's 596 precincts, trudging both sides of every street and posting a smattering of snap shots from each small electoral area. I began in late 2012 and expect to finish by the end of 2021; I've completed 430/596 today. The photos are more focused on homeowner idiosyncrasies and architecture than on people, but I've met and photographed hundreds of San Franciscans.
And recently I've realized I'm experiencing what feels like an anomaly. I know well the historical description of Black displacement I've recited above. Yet in nearly every little electoral area I explore, I seem to see at least one Black person. Then I got a glimmer. Black people "stick out" because none of these places (except by the rock outcroppings under the projects in the movie; I've walked there) are Black communities. The remaining Black people in this city live "mixed in" among other San Franciscans.
The pervasive feeling of loss in this city is not just, or even primarily, an individual agony; it is communal. Feeling safe and at-home as an individual is a demographic privilege that accompanies knowing one has, somewhere, a community home-place. Whites enjoy it in this city most everywhere; some people of some Asian origins have it in some parts of the city; LGBT people of diverse "races" have it in some areas; Latinx people have it in shrinking locales and must live in fear of losing it; Black people can almost no longer claim it at all. Such is San Francisco today.
It was heartening this morning to see that New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been both asking her police/counter-intelligence apparatus to investigate whether they ought to have come across clues about the killer in their midst -- and also was pushing to reduce the killing capacity of legal guns. Those are the sort of governmental measures which are appropriate after an atrocity like the Christchurch massacre.
But being human, we also ask, why? What makes a young man from an unremarkable Australian family (which was "shattered" by his crime) into a monster? Why do some individuals take a violent direction?
Deeyah Khan makes films about this question. Raised in Norway, the child of Afghan and Pakistani Muslim parents, and now a Brit, she calls herself "born in the West to parents from the East." In 2015, she used her facility in several worlds to create the documentary Jihad: A Story of the Others. It consists of her revealing interactions with British Muslims who had once been attracted to violent extremism, but who had eventually found other paths through which to express their cultures and serve their communities.
Then Khan jumped off what might look like the deep end into a cesspool of hate, filming US white nationalists in action at Charlottesville, at a rural martial arts training camp, and in their homes. Yes, she reports, there were times when she was plenty scared for herself, a lone, brown, Muslim woman among these posturing men. The product is White Right: Meeting The Enemy.
The film is gripping and affecting. It will surprise few reading here that the "intellectual" super-stars of hate like Jared Taylor seen in the trailer are a lot less interesting than the foot soldiers. The "leaders" are just making a buck off their cult; many of the guys in trenches of this vicious movement are better captured in what one says of himself:
"I was an egomaniac with no self-esteem."
Of course, sometimes people who are their targets die -- at Charlottesville, in Charleston, and at Christchurch.
Both Khan's documentaries are available from Netflix; highly recommended.
...
Deeyah Khan shared challenging thoughts in a Vox interview about what we can do about these young men who endanger us all and who are suckers for far more evil people.
They want us to become really afraid; they want us to become divided; they want us to join their “us and them” thing. On a larger scale, I think we have to resist that. It’s an argument for celebrating and nurturing our diversity and nurturing our multicultural society, and our pluralism.
But on a more concrete, practical level, I think we need to support people who want to leave these groups, because we often underestimate how many people, once they’re in it, actually want to leave but find zero support, because everybody is so busy condemning these guys that nobody really wants to extend a hand to them and let them get out. I think that’s really, really important.
... I still feel positive and hopeful, because I do think change is possible, and I think it’s going to require us not giving up. All of these extremists want us to give up, to fear each other and them, to become more divided. And they don’t want us to be kind, or to show empathy, or to organize, or to vote, or to do any of that.
There didn't seem much point in urging readers to see this extraordinary film (which we saw yesterday) as it was only being offered for two days in limited venues. But it's wild success in sold out theaters means you might have a chance to catch it. Do.
Director/film artist Peter Jackson has taken contemporary World War I footage provided by the British Imperial War Museums and brought it to life. This means not just colorizing and smoothing -- it means maniacal attention to authentic details of life and death among the British Tommys in the trenches.
As Jackson would have wished, I am haunted by the sight of a battalion of young men huddled in a ditch with fixed bayonets, waiting -- expectantly, anxiously, eagerly, fearfully -- for the order to go "over the top" -- where most probably met ugly, quick and meaningless death under impassable machine gun fire. This was their war.
There were other peoples' wars. The Russian, Central European, Balkan, and Ottoman wars were probably worse, more cruel and brutal, and did not end so cleanly with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, continuing for years. And there was the war as the U.S. experienced it: despite 53,000 deaths among U.S. soldiers, neither commanding General George Pershing nor President Woodrow Wilson welcomed the end of hostilities. They had hoped for further combat to underline the superiority of U.S. wealth and power once we joined the battle in October 1917.
Jackson urges viewers to seek out members of their family who remember an older generation which lived the war. We've got only a short window left to hear those stories.
Fascinating. The Motion Picture Academy voted the Oscar for best documentary feature to the Netflix production Icarus, that rarity, something I'd actually seen. And written about. The film tells the story of how Russian doctor Grigory Rodchenkov organized and oversaw the doping at the Sochi Winter Olympics which helped his country's team win an unheard of 13 gold medals. Exposure of that state-sponsored Russian cheating caused the national team to be barred from the recently concluded Korean winter games.
It's not a great movie; in fact it struck me more as an unfinished a first draft of a potential future character study of Rodchenkov than as a completed work. I can only see the Academy's enthusiasm for it an expression of hostility, of our lurking sense in this country that mysterious Russians are messing with us.
But that itself makes for a metaphor which seems apt. Olympic athletes who don't use drugs, who follow the rules, train and compete within national and international structures which are supposed to exclude cheaters and guarantee fairness. But everyone within many sports knows the system is full of corruption, probably rigged against honest competitors.
As we watch a dishonest president melt down while under investigation for election cheating, perhaps we can identify with the athletes who can only watch while seeing cheating from the same source?
Hence an Oscar for Icarus. Let's hope the award helps ensure the safety of the whistle-blower Rodchenkov who lives in fearful exile from Putin's retribution for speaking out.
We can take it as a given that, in order to encourage his white evangelical Christian supporters to turn out for aspiring-Senator Pedophile in Alabama, President Predator decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy there. For his evangelical Christian base, this was even more attractive candy than anti-abortion federal judges. Ever since the Israelis occupied the city fifty years ago, the U.S. and Europe have been refusing to confer this mark of legitimacy on that conquest. The "peace process" between expansionist Israel and their subject Palestinian population has long been a sham and the U.S. claim to be an "honest broker" nothing but hegemonic flimflam. Still Trump was ready to roil multiple unstable countries and get some number of protesting Palestinians killed for domestic political gain.
Today, Israel is a voting priority for many evangelicals. A 2015 poll noted that 64 percent of evangelical Christian Republicans say that a candidate’s stance on Israel matters “a lot,” compared with 33 percent of non-evangelical Republicans and 26 percent of all Americans.
And evangelical Christian voters, unlike Jews, represent a significant percentage of Republican voters. Some 26 percent of the electorate identified in the 2016 elections as born-again or evangelical Christian, and 81 percent of them voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton. Capturing evangelical support is essential for Republican candidates; as of 2014, evangelical and born-again voters represented the plurality (45 percent) of voters who are Republican or who lean Republican.
Those of us who are not part of this particular Christian subtribe, "dispensational pre-millennialists," may not realize why advancing Israel's power matters so much to these people. They believe that they are seeing Biblical prophecies of end-times being played out right now, that Jesus will return only when the Jews retake Jerusalem, destroy the Islamic holy mosque which has occupied what was the Temple Mount for centuries, and then rebuild King David's temple. Bloody battles will ensue (no kidding!) and the Jews will accept Christ and all will be hunky-dory for a 1000 years. This is the lovely fable which some 50 million Americans absorbed from such texts as The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series. They believe it with all their hearts and unhappy souls. And they believe that a serial liar and sexual predator can serve as God's instrument to make it all happen.
Diana Butler Bass, a scholar who writes on U.S. culture and religion, grew up in this tradition though she long ago left it. She's good at conveying how it feels:
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I attended a "Bible church," a nondenominational congregation that prided itself on a singular devotion to scripture. We read the Bible all the time: in personal Bible study and evening Bible classes. We listened to hourlong Sunday morning sermons. For us, the Bible was not just a guide to piety. It also revealed God's plan for history. Through it, we learned how God had worked in the past and what God would do in the future.
Central to that plan was Jerusalem, the city of peace, and the dwelling place of God. It was special to the Jews because it was the home of Abraham and David. It was special to us because it was where Jesus had died and risen. We believed that ultimately, Christ would return to Jerusalem to rule as its king. We longed for this outcome -- and we prayed that human history would help bring about this biblical conclusion.
Jerusalem was our prophetic bellwether. God's plan hung on its fate. Whenever Israel gained more political territory, whenever Israel extended its boundaries, it was God's will, the end-times unfolding on the evening news. Jerusalem, as the spiritual heart of Israel, mattered. Jerusalem was God's holy city, of the ancient past, in its conflicted present, and for the biblical future.
Almost a decade ago, the documentary Waiting for Armageddon followed an evangelical pastor on a congregational bus tour through holy sites in Palestine; various teachers make sure the tourists understand they are seeing arenas of fortunate future carnage.
"There will be an ultimate final battle and it will be a lot of fun to watch ..."
"Christ will come back with a sword at this side ... we're going to be behind him with swords in our hands ... we're going to be his army ... the blood from this battle will be as high as a horse's bridle..."
When not anticipating such jubilant slaughter, this chilling film shows the group belting out the "Star Spangled Banner" under a U.S. and an Israeli flag while riding on a boat on the Sea of Galilee.
Though some references show when it was made (in the film, rumors of war look to Babylon in Iraq, not Gaza and Sana'a), the documentary holds up frighteningly well. Many (most?) evangelicals still believe this ugly stuff; they still want to make it happen; and now they have a friend in the White House.
Here's the trailer. The entire film is available on YouTube and well worth watching.
As a narrative arc, the Netflix documentary Icarus is a mess. Author/playwright Bryan Fogel, an accomplished amateur cyclist, was inspired by notorious professional cycling doper Lance Armstrong's successful demonstration that drug testing could be beaten to see whether he could duplicate that feat at his level of competition. So he tried doping, got good advice on how to beat the system, and filmed himself sticking a needle in his butt, repeatedly.
Fogel's mentors in the dope detection business put him in touch with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of Russia's anti-doping lab and the guy who oversaw drug testing at the Sochi Olympics where Russian athletes won an unprecedented 13 golds. Vladimir Putin awarded Rodchenkov an Order of Friendship after that accomplishment.
For reasons that the movie never makes clear, Rodchenkov involved himself gleefully in Fogel's doping experiment, including welcoming the filmmaker into his home and life in Moscow -- along with his urine samples. The two men became buddies.
And then a World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) investigation concluded that there was something rotten about the Sochi drug monitoring. Rodchenkov's world starts to collapse; he fears he'll be made to take the fall for this insult to Russian pride. He has been locked up previously when Russian sport was under threat; he knows the secret police, the FSB, are looking at him.
So he takes off for Los Angeles to join his friend Fogel, carrying a hard drive of doping records and samples of the tools for urine sample swapping. Back in Moscow, at least one other mid-level sports doping figure turns up dead. The film recounts the Fogel and Rodchenkov's struggle to get protection from US legal authorities, convince WADA (however unwelcome they may find the information) that he's got the goods, and finally how he took the story to the New York Times which continues to follow the story. Although the evidence is close to irrefutable, international sports bodies, including the International Olympic Committee and FIFA which runs World Cup football, have so far chosen to protect Russian inclusion over the truth of their sports' corruption. Rodchenkov ends up under "witness protection," hidden somewhere in the United States.
I can only wonder whether Rodchenkov worries whether somewhere among the nest of con-men that surround our Putin-admiring president, there's an official willing to sell out his location to the FSB. After all, apparently a former National Security Advisor was discussing a kidnapping for pay for the Turks...
The movie could have used a lot of tightening up. Fogel's original project gets lost; international intrigue takes over. When/if the Russian doping saga becomes more resolved, I would not be surprised if there's a deeper remake; Rodchenkov is a fascinating figure. Until then, this is certainly worth a couple of hours.
Gore uses himself as a model of persistence when despair might seem warranted. If this man, so proud yet so often humiliated, can keep at it, who are we to shrink from dedicated resistance to mass extinction?
Because I am not visually inclined, my apprehension of the effects of the modern human carbon dioxide burning spree leans toward the intellectual rather than toward visual images. This film filled me with pictures to haunt my nightmares. That's a good and necessary thing.
What I'm ambivalent about:
If the film has a policy message, it is that curbing climate catastrophe is going to have to include making peace, "cutting deals," with the industrial and fossil fuel magnates whose pursuit of profit got the planet into this fix. That's hard. It runs against the grain, for example, of the brave, spiritual, and inspirational resistance that native people led against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Or does it? This film doesn't help resolve that question. It's probably a necessary truth, but I don't think activists yet deal easily with attempts to elide how uncomfortable it is. Nor should we.
Gore. After having the presidency stolen from him by Republican Supremes, the guy has had a very good, socially useful, post-electoral career. But it remains hard to identify with someone who can call up heads of state and corporate poohbahs and trust he will get some kind of hearing.
***
The showing at the Embarcadero was preceded by an odd series of teasers, all carefully labeled "approved by the Motion Picture Association" as suitable for showing with Gore's film. Why someone took such care, I don't know. These all looked interesting: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World; Menashe about an ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn Jewish community; and the forthcoming Whose Streets which documents Ferguson, MO after the shooting of Michael Brown.
If you aren't from San Francisco and you want to know what all those privileged San Franciscans are whining about, this film does a good job at sharing the pain from long time residents' perspective -- and recounts a provisional victory in the struggle for a diverse, multi-faceted city.
The story of a neighborhood fighter, Aaron Peskin, taking back a seat on the Board of Supervisors from a shill for the tech money men is worth your time. Aaron is what I call a "good candidate" -- willing to do what it takes and put up with the ugly aggravations of fighting for an office for a purpose beyond personal ambition.
Gentrification isn't just about new people coming to town. An awful lot of San Franciscans moved here from elsewhere, either because elsewhere was intolerable or for this city's wacky attractions. It's true; people come and go and cities change. Lots of San Franciscans didn't much like it when hippies and gays over ran their "respectable" burg several decades ago, but we eventually came to terms.
Today's gentrification is about how big money is polluting our politics and crushing chances for people without hedge funds and tech billions to live here -- forever. And the excluded will include ordinary tech employees who don't hit the big time, as most won't.
Company Town is showing in the Bay Area several places in the next few weeks.
Fall weekends are for football, in my happy fantasy existence. That's irresponsible; I know. Taking pleasure in watching athletic young men risk their brains and bodies for the profits of the sport's barons is a guilty pleasure. Besides, elections mostly happen in the fall -- during too many years I've missed the football season entirely because there was something more important to attend to.
In 1983, we almost got a professional football league, the USFL, that played in the spring. That would have added an interesting wrinkle. The USFL was a breathe of fresh air, the spawning ground of a wide open style that challenged and eventually was adopted by the established NFL. We owe the USFL for such innovations as the 2 point conversion after a touchdown and instant replay. The new league created a bidding war for stars which raised the compensation of all professional football players.
Trump with a prize property, the great running back Herschel Walker
But the league failed economically after three seasons. Filmmaker Mike Tollin shot video highlight shows for the USFL, so he watched the league's failure from the sidelines, literally. In 2009, he made 30 for 30: Small Potatoes: Who killed the USFL? His short answer to the title's question: Donald Trump! Here's his description:
Many involved, from owners to coaches to players to fans to members of the media, believed that this new spring football league was something special. Three straight years the USFL did the unthinkable and plucked the Heisman Trophy winner away from the NFL. The spring games received good TV ratings and were played before larger than expected enthusiastic crowds. Rule changes made the game more exciting and unpredictable, and the spring league seemed the perfect bridge from the Super Bowl to Labor Day for a football-starved nation.
So what happened? Why didn't it last?
Well, it seems that a certain high-profile and impatient team owner, whose name now adorns towers and hotels and golf courses all over the world, had convinced his colleagues that the league should either move to a fall season and go head-to-head with the NFL, or fold its tents. So after three years of play, the USFL suspended play and focused its efforts on an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL. And after the jury ruled the USFL owners would have to divvy up the princely sum of three dollars, the full amount of the settlement, the tents were indeed packed up hastily.
Tollin's film is fun because for many of its players and some owners, the USFL was football merged with fun, fulfilling a dream of professional play in intimate settings with other enthusiasts and among friendly fans. Those of us who appreciated USFL veterans who later became NFL stars like Steve Young and Doug Flutie can appreciate the delight with which they reminisce here.
But USFL owners were open to the ambitions of the real estate huckster who bought the Jersey franchise in the the second season. Trump sold the other owners on a dream of succeeding on the cheap. Instead of painstakingly nurturing a desirable new product, they would sue the NFL for acting as a monopoly. The film includes a clip of Trump with the lawyer he brought on for the job: Roy Cohn. Nominally they won, but the jury didn't see fit to award the USFL owners the big monetary damages they wanted and the league collapsed. One of the film's interviewee's summarized: "greed and patience don't live together very well."
As in so many other ventures, when Trump could not get what he wanted, he pulled down the edifice around him, and walked away blustering while others suffered. It was all about him. Oh yeah -- "that's business."
Filmmaker Mike Tollin has released a copy of Trump's note to him on being shown the documentary:
Small Potatoes: Who killed the USFL? is readily available for streaming and worth an odd hour for yet another window on the the Trump phenomenon. I was struck by how little the con man has changed over the years. Even in the 80s, he already had the patter and the silly hair. And he already felt no obligation to understand or take responsibility for the effects his actions might have on others around him. The guy is one sick puppy.
Pretty much all I can say about this film is that I'm glad I was not raised in a poor family of beekeepers in Tuscany. These apparently contemporary peasants live a brutal life and are further exploited by a society for whom they are objects of entertainment. No amount of romantic mooning over "simple pleasures" and a beautiful young woman's coming of age provides relief from the anxious, exhausting horror of these lives.
Plus the filmmaker needed a ruthless editor and viable storyline. In all, this film left me a little bored and generally drained. Other viewers disagree. It won some film festival awards, proving I don't know what.
The Last Day of Freedom is an animated film that was nominated for Best Short Documentary in the 2016 Academy Awards. In his own words, Bill Babbitt tells the story of his little brother Manny, one of the only 13 men executed since California resumed killing offenders in 1976. Seven hundred and forty-six condemned men currently await execution on death row, although California has not actually killed any prisoner since 2006. We will be voting on the death penalty again in November. Prop. 62 would end the practice; Prop. 66 would attempt to streamline the machinery of legal death.
The two brothers grew up together, went clamming together, played together. But Manny was injured in an accident, bounced out of school, and ended up in the Marines in Vietnam. He was shot up.
Manny came home [from Khe Sanh]... they were able to patch up his physical wound, but they never got around to patching up that wound in his head ... he came home from another tour of duty. ... he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia ... so Manny traded his hooch in Vietnam for a cardboard box on the street of Providence, Rhode Island.
So brother Bill took his lost brother into his Sacramento home. But all was not well.
I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn't put my hand on it ... I let Manny get away from me .. . my little brother was out there fighting these battles [in his head]
When Bill found a lighter with the initials of a recent, highly publicized murder victim among Manny's stuff, he knew his brother had done something awful. He reported what he had found to the cops. He explained that his brother was a mentally-damaged veteran. He even led the cops to pick up Manny.
I come here this morning because somebody died. I want that to be the end of death. Don't shoot my brother ...
The police didn't shoot Manny. Bill seems to believe that the cops really expected Manny would end up in a mental institution. But a local prosecutor wanted a notch in her belt. The jury was all white. Manny's lawyer was drunk during the penalty phase, and Manny got a death sentence.
This being modern California, appeals and delays lasted nearly twenty years, but Manny was executed in 1999. While on death row, he was awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam. He was buried with full military honors.
The little film is a tour de force of animated story telling and crisp narrative. only 30 minutes long, it is a wrenching window on a terrible practice.
It is easy to believe that, however dreadful his crimes, Manny would never have faced execution if he'd been white, if anyone cared that our soldiers are driven mad, or if he'd had competent lawyering. But he didn't enjoy those advantages. His execution is testimony to the racist and arbitrary character of California's enormously expensive and dysfunctional death system. We can stop this by passing Prop. 62 in November.
