Notes for DYING DAYS

When things get too confused on the screen, go to paper.

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Birthday greeting from Arabia
via Orson Welles and
the other Richard Burton

Friend and poet Michael Gushue reports this alleged lost scene from the Citizen Kane script:

Kane stands with his butler/factotum, Raymond in the family tomb. His only son, Charles Foster Kane II, is dead at the age of 31. The year is 1938, and workmen are setting a slab on the grave.

After they leave, Kane looks at the simple inscriptions on the crypts of his father, mother and son.

Above the blank space reserved for him, is an inscription on an ornate, ancient wall imported from Persia.

Kane translates for Raymond (bored and couldn’t care less):

The drunkenness of youth
Has passed like a fever
And yet I saw many things
Seeing my glory in the days of my glory

I thought my power eternal
And the days of my life
Fixed surely in the years
But a whisper came to me
From Him who dies not

I called my tributary kings together
And those who were proud rulers under me
I opened the boxes of my treasure to them, saying
“Take hills of gold, mountains of silver
And give me one more day upon the earth”

But they stood silent
Looking upon the ground
So that I died
And Death came to sit upon my throne

O sons of men
You see a stranger upon the road
You call to him and he does not stop
He is your life
Walking towards time
Hurrying to meet the kings of India and China

O sons of men
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider
Nothing waits behind it

Where are the men with towering hopes?
They have changed places with owls
Owls who lived in tombs
And now inhabit a palace

We live in affluence
And are blind to where we are

Our concerns and feuds
Fill our time every day

You must ask yourself
What is the worth?

The more things change …

Alfred Hitchcock presents …

… a fine elderly unemployed couple, about to be bounced out of their home, try to work things out.

… the trauma of losing your job.

Film: The White Ribbon —
Crisis of the Old Order

Magnificent. Must see. Glorious black and white. Gloriously and utterly un-American. One recalls why, when we were young, people thought film was a serious art.

It’s a psychological whodunit, to begin. So it’s natural the reviews would focus on the puzzles. Even so …

Spoiler Alert. The rest of this is for people who’ve seen it already. Unless one cares not to preserve a fresh first viewing.

Even so, the lack of comment in the reviews on the treatment of social history is surprising. This is what struck my mind throughout, and seems upon further thought the Grund of the story, the spine of the script.

Confirmation here comes (after dozens of hints) rather late when the Baronness declares she is leaving the Estate, and indeed leaving Germany — and is taking her son, the family heir.

Thus dissolves the Baron’s household, the power atop the village social structure, and the employer of most of its people.

Why does the Baroness bail? Because she has fallen in love with a banker in Lombardy (ie Milan), who swept her off her feet with his energy and sophistication, and was good with the boy.

Thus the Gentry gives way to the Liberals — the industrialists and their bankers, the Capitalists, the Bourgeoisie beloved of Saint-Simon — atop the pile of struggling classes.

Each of the adult male characters speaks for a familiar estate/class of late feudal society. Only the Officer is missing. But his clamor can be heard at film’s end, as his day dawns in 1914.

The Doctor serves well as a representative of Modern Science:

– mistreating, after deeply exploiting, the pre-modern Midwife (his professional precursor in the Middle Age now vanishing). He despises her “stench” and finally wishes she were dead.

– abusing the trust and curiosity of his daughter because, as he explains to the Midwife, his passions are autonomous, ungovernable, beyond good and evil. Robert Oppenheimer comes to mind. Or How I Learned to Love the Bomb.

Whether the Doctor’s unexplained departure at story’s end marks him (and Modern Science) a monster or a black hero turns perhaps on whether one comes to feel he has adopted (acknowledged?) the Midwife’s retarded son or, prefiguring the Nazis, has euthanized him. That his own boys are named Adolph and Rudi (Hess?) puts a point on the question but doesn’t decide it.

And note, most broadly, that while the children of the Minister and the Doctor are in close congress, their fathers seem to exist in separate towns. Or ages. Like Christendom and its successor Modernity.

As for details, a dozen otherwise odd and/or disjointed events in the film find justification (beyond gratuitous thrill-making) and make simple sense when considered as social history or pathology.

E.g., the Minister’s suppression of his son’s sexuality. The boy’s face (on the poster above) says it all: One of these decades that kettle’s gonna blow.

His name is Martin. Dubbed, no doubt, by his earnest father in honor of Luther. But as quickly as that came to mind I thought of Martin Bormann. Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man.

Also interesting, in this vein, is the crudely bon-vivant and violent Steward of the estate, occupying his position of petty power between the Baron and the Peasants. In southern Italy such pastoral players were the root of what blossomed, as Noble control faded, into the urban mafias.

And, indeed — the Steward has been cast (Josef Bierbichler) as a hulking dark and garrulous Italian type, utterly distinct in appearance and behavior from the reserved Saxons that populate most of the screen. In particular his joking with ladies about sex stands out. Are we are to guess he was hired from Uncle Eduardo’s estate in Lombardy? Perhaps to keep the increasingly restive Peasants in line?

The film compares, then, to Bertolucci’s 1900 (in essence, not style).

To The French Lieutenant’s Woman — though much more Fowles’ novel than the film.

And to Ivy Compton-Burnett, who across some 20 novels, all set in late Victorian mansions peopled by failing grownups and bitter, biting children, told an epic story of social decline and shifting class loyalties and behaviors.

Both Bergman and Dreyer of course also come to mind, for various reasons, re both style and concern to tell social history, even if one believes Fanny and Alexander were happy kids.

It seems, then, that A.O. Scott, in particular, missed quite a big boat here. He seems to have been mezmerized by the spectacular surface psychology — and thus left to complain that Haneke told a shallow story (oh so familiar in America) that blames the Nazis on “child abuse.”

On the contrary: The surmise of the narrator (the now-old Schoolmaster) that this story, even if less than perfectly true, may help explain what the kids went on to accomplish in their prime, working hard and playing hard, seems well supported: The dissolution of the Old Order, and the Blow in Sarajevo (the first war and its disastrous sequelae), gave the deviant Nazis an opening to power.

Thank goodness it couldn’t happen here, where a prosperous and populous Middle Class exercises sovereignty in a vibrant constitutional democratic — uh, hmmm …

Finally, no reviewer I’ve seen has suggested what, after two viewings, seems clear: the gentle, somewhat bumbling Schoolmaster, played by Christian Friedel, is intended to be understood as Jewish.

The kind features of his face, his distinctively dark hair, his distinctively broad education, all support this reading, but also:

– his bitchy chastisement by the Baronness about church music and the church calendar;

– the otherwise pointless evasion of his would-be father-in-law at the matrimonial negotiation, who remarks that the teacher’d be better off working in his father’s shop in town (where your kind belong); and

– at story’s end, the abrupt and monstrous dressing down he suffers from the Minister after suggesting that the latter’s children are sadistic criminals. Denounced as “repulsive” and threatened with prison, ordered to “get out” and never return, he timidly acquiesces.

Thus fails, too — when the Other challenges at a stroke both Bible and Blut — the structure of Assimilation.

That the Schoolmaster when young was a Jew well at home in Bismarck’s young nation-state casts new light on his opening sad hope of somehow explaining “what happened later” as an effect of the alienating contradictions of old Christendom and its dissolution under pressure of Modernity’s miracles and wonders.

“The world’s not going to collapse.”

Twice we hear this during the year the Schoolmaster is required to wait for his bride: a naive but golden girl from a nearby town, daughter of a straight-shooting German Arbeiter, the very best that society has to offer a man of the Schoolmaster’s station.

But then comes the news from Sarajevo, and the marriage — consummation of Assimiliation — doesn’t come off.

Instead the erstwhile groom goes to war, for the Kaiser. And afterward, he tells us, never returns to the baronial village, returning instead to his hometown, to take over his father’s tailor shop. Which leaves the tinkling of Kristallnacht in one’s ears as the story fades to black.

We first met the Schoolmaster with his arm around Karli, the retarded boy, framed in the schoolhouse door — as the gang of kids, somewhat distant, snidely look on and sneer. It’s difficult not to think here of the Third Reich’s select victims. The kids will go on to burn both books and teacher.

Click

An evening at Fancast:
Night People in Paris, Texas

Saw three remarkable films last night on Fancast, the Poor Man’s Friend.

1. The Elephant Man. Magnificent again.

Brings to mind Dwight Gooden’s glorious rookie year, in that David Lynch never made a better film, although great things did follow.

Gorgeous black & white — in 1980. BEFORE Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. I had transposed the two in memory.

Had the last American feature distributed (just barely) in b&w been Faces by Cassavetes in 1968?

People who know their movies probably know.

Anthony Hopkins here became a film star.

And John Hurt, hidden behind the hideous mask, yet so there, won the British oscar, and it seems perhaps a squeeze of Charlotte Rampling.

Hurt went on to be Winston in Michael Radford’s 1984, four years later.

Two milestones to be proud of.

Or three, counting Charlotte.

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2. Mister 880. 1950.

Young buck Burt Lancaster as a Treasury cad on the heels of genial counterfeiter Edmund Gwenn, who three years before had been Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.

In each case nominated for an Oscar.

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3. Night People. 1954. Berlin. Or at least a few long shots to establish the Geschmack. In stark raving Technicolor.

Gregory Peck is a colonel of Army intelligence, stiff as a board, but the script is so good, along with Buddy Ebsen and Broderick Crawford, that it’s great.

The story is as realistic, violent and accurate as to the ways of Spookdom as any John Le Carre. What’s odd is the deadpan vaudevillian humor. An odd mix not easy to pull off, I imagine.

But they did.

And there’s a Soviet colonel who wants to defect. Colonel Peck has made the arrangements.

The Russian’s one demand?

To be re-settled in Paris, Texas.

?!?

The Russian, during the war, when Russ and Yank were friends, had passed through on a flight from Kamchatcha, east across the Bering Sea.

Had stopped to refuel in Paris, Texas.

And ever since had been dreaming … Of a girl?

Natasha Kinski ?

His daughter?

Had he promised her Parisian mother to return?

Alas. Berlin was to be his last battleground.

And did mom finally fail, leaving their daughter to the streets, to which years later she fled in return?

I suppose none of this is news to people who know their movies.

Newsweek said (of Wim Wenders’ film):

It is a story of the United states, a grim portrait of a land where people like Travis and Jane cannot put down roots, a story of a sprawling, powerful, richly endowed land where people can get desperately lost.

But not without reason?

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Richard Burton
speaks to the epigone

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Four half-hour chats — from 1980 with Dick Cavett.

A fine heart and mind. And interesting times.

He talks remarkably of his father, a coal miner. And of alcohol and his saving-grace wife, Susan.

The four clips, linked here, are from the NY Times site, where Cavett has a column:

Part One. Wales. His father the coal miner.

Part Two. Growing up poor & orphaned but happy. Stumbling into acting & catching the bug. Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud.

Part Three. Garbo. His journals. Writers. Bogart & Bacall & John Huston. Spencer Tracy. Hubris. Elizabeth Taylor. His own films. The Bogey stories are fun.

Part Four. Demon Rum. His wife Susan. A taste of Camelot.

And throughout: the slings and arrows of acting and life and other arts, from one who learned most of what he knows out of school.

Bravo, PBS. And Mr Cavett, who fields a number of short-hoppers with thoughtful aplomb. Noticed him about town some months ago, looking spry.

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Camelot on Broadway, with Julie Andrews, 1960-61

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Alan Jay Lerner and director Moss Hart adapted Camelot from T.H. White’s rejuvenation of the King Arthur legend, The Once and Future King. Frederick Loewe came grudgingly aboard to write the music.

Burton and Julie Andrews were the original headliners, the latter as Guineviere, fresh from her smash in My Fair Lady, also by Lerner and Loewe. Robert Goulet got his first break as lovelorn Lancelot. Broadway’s advance-sales records were broken.

The show had been five hours plus in out-of-town trials, with Loewe and Hart seriously ill and Lerner suffering marriage trauma. The latter in later years was keen to credit Burton’s “faith and geniality” for holding the production together.

It opened on Broadway in early December 1960. Senator Kennedy had defeated Vice President Nixon four weeks earlier.

Twenty years later, it’s between performances of a Camelot revival at Lincoln Center that Burton sits with Cavett. Exhausting exercise, at age 55.

Weeks later Burton had radical back surgery. The pain or a certain constriction can be seen in his eyes.

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Night of the Iguana, with Sue Lyon, 1964

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Talking at frank length about alcohol, Burton credits his wife Susan with likely saving his life.

Four years later he was dead. At 59.

I remember my mother grieving a bit, not for having lost a star, but something closer to the bone, bearing on early deaths of her oldest brother and father, the latter whom, like Burton, died in his 50s of a brain hemorrage.

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With Liz Taylor

Life in bloom.

He met Elizabeth Taylor in 1963, while filming Cleopatra, at the time the most expensive film in history.

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They were married twice, from March 1964 to July 1976, taking sixteen months off in June 1974.

Was it Nixon’s resignation …?

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It’s generally thought that they acted out private life, with encouragement from Mike Nicholls, as Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966

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Six years after the last divorce, he speaks of Taylor as a good friend.

And argues she was a great screen actress, underrated because of beauty, but due for rediscovery and immortality.

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Asking about his diaries, Cavett suggests that Burton is in essence a writer.

The actor allows he’s had ten or so extracts from his journals published — but merely in places that pay well. Ladies Home Journal. Cosmopolitan.

Then offers that he admires writers above all other “craftsmen,” and prefers their company, among artistic types, finding painters “inarticulate” and actors wont to tell stories rather than converse.

Throughout, comments about acting and the business focus on scripts and mention authors.

Post mortem, a book was carved out of his journals, and published to rave reviews.

Seems the thinking man’s world found itself shocked to find he was not a gigolo.

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Boom! 1968

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He speaks of his father, Richard Jenkins, as a genius coal miner. The stories are laced with alcohol and affection.

But elsewhere he spoke of the man’s violence. And when the father died in 1957, his namesake son, 32 and famous, did not attend the funeral.

His mother had died when he was two, giving birth to her thirteenth child at age 44. He says he has no memories.

At some point the state made master Richard Jenkins a ward of Philip Burton, one of his schoolteachers and a scholar of the theater. The lad’s passion for rugby was channeled elsewhere.

“I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic,” the actor later said. (So reports biographer Melvyn Bragg.)

It’s curious that he speaks at such length about his father with Cavett, yet so briefly — but with honor — of Philip Burton, whom he reports alive and well and living in Key West.

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The Longest Day

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The photo at the very top here is also from The Longest Day, where Burton stands out, — amid a huge top-drawer Hollywood ensemble, and among the work-hard-play-hard Yank soldiery — as a quiet, hard-drinking RAF pilot on the verge of losing his nerve.

One imagines he cherished the role, having served in the RAF for three years during the war.

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He came home intending to return to Oxford, but found the town so crowded at that moment with veterans that his chances to make the rugby squad were deemed poor.

So, instead, with Philip Burton’s aid and comfort, he answered an ad for an acting job …

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His last film was magnificent: Michael Radford’s 1984, shot in the spring of Orwell’s year.

John Hurt was an obvious and indeed perfect Winston.

Less than obvious was Burton as O’Brien, the Ministry of Truth officer who watches then arrests Winston, methodically interrogates and breaks him, then washes his brain. A fierce minimalist perfect performance.

He died months later. August 5.

The 1984 now seems a bookend to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, from John le Carre’s breakthrough book. Another great minimalist characterization in an important film about secret police.

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The cold spy, with celestial Claire Bloom. 1965

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HOWEVER …

I hadn’t realized, knowing only his post 50s films, that Burton’s roots were so wide and deep in the English theater

More than once he tells Cavett that he doesn’t watch movies at all, work aside, and suspects only ten or twelve of his 60 or so are worth preserving from fire.

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His Hamlet here in 1964 was much remarked upon.

There’s a filmed rehearsal run-through available on CD, which became the basis, two summers ago, of a revival extravaganza on a big screen in Central Park (if memory serves) and then the Public Theater.

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I missed it. But do have the CD, which is always a bit disappointing, because the actor is indeed running through the text.

Watching the erstwhile rising rugby star run, however, one can imagine the fearsome athletic power he brought to the role. An Achilles of a Hamlet.

Able to snap Claudius’s neck with a hand.

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Burton speaks highly of Gielgud, who directed him in Hamlet but also later remarked that Burton was, indeed, too rough for the role. Meaning, perhaps, nothing more, or less, than that he was a Welshman.

Toward the end of their chat, Cavett notes that his wife had performed with Burton years before in Munich.

The actor responds with a taste of Hamlet’s second soliloquoy in German.

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The passing of Paul Newman a year ago left me feeling similarly bereaved.

Is it only in context — contrasted with the luminaries and prospects of our day — that Burton seems so remarkable here, chatting with an urbane fellow traveler of the cosmopolis, as Reagan’s presidency, which just a few months before had seemed as always a ludicrous long-shot, so lugubriously dawned?

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February 8, 1966

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Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

The Camelot company did an original cast album in 1961. Burton refers to the lovely royalties with a smile, and replies to Cavett’s request for a piece of his quality by noting that viewers may yet buy the record.

The music had caught on inside the Kennedy White House. Mr Richard Burton had been invited to dinner.

And after the state murder, Camelot inspired Jackie to compare her husband’s administration to the court of young Arthur, who after innocently pulling a sword from a stone had found himself king, and gone on, legend goes, to do noble things.

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February 6, 1968: Bobby, Liz, Richard and Ethel.
Four months later a dream fully died.

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JFK, incoming, was not much like Arthur: His progress to the White House was long planned and well contrived, and he’d been working in town, in Congress, for twelve years already, and had been raised in a family that traded at the highest levels.

Nevertheless, his odyssey once arrived at the big house was indeed that of an Arthurian ingenue, quick on his feet, able to sniff rats, and change course, intent on nobler things.

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Burton was banned from the BBC for speaking of Churchill as a mass-murderer and quasi-fascistic racist in his conduct of the war.

He spoke of himself as a socialist, life long, and his pride in honest labor is the steady note in the tales he tells Cavett of his father, and the sisters who raised him, and his six brothers all of whom went to the mines.

Yet to avoid the King’s tax man, the escape artist resided in Switzerland, from the 50s onward.

And is buried there, in Celigny, on the shores of icy majestic Lake Geneva.

M

Fortune Cookie

Something to chew on came my way at lunch circa 2006:

Time is Precious. But Truth is More Precious than Time.

Wow. Alas.

The Man’s too much …

Aw hell …

Finally done:
A Good Day in Hell

I began this darn script on August 18, 2006. Day 22 !!!

Tonight, after many developments, drafts, distractions, derailments and deaths, including baby steps toward a low-budget production and Wall Street blowing its brains out …

Tonight it seems perfected: properly abandoned.

On Day 1,184. Good dog almighty …

The prior six scripts received no more than four months of attention. But this, the trouble and time of a novel.

A toast is in order. Let’s see …

Well, modest — but tasty: the superbly bitter Rye Pale Ale that Michelob has put out to compete with all the artsy crafty beers.

Tomorrow back to business.

And, in the evening, perhaps, a bit of wild Decompression.

Ireland ratifies the Lisbon Treaty
Old Europe is history

Well. Ireland has voted 67-33 in a referendum to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, which would pretty much create a United States of Europe centrally governed by the EU apparatus in Brussels.

It seems to me a sad day, despite a recent half-apology for dem Bilderbergers.

Last year, of course, the Irish rejected the treaty/constituiton, drawing the ire of the continental powers. This time around, the Times story suggests, fear born of the current economic crisis and a media blitz did the trick.

I wonder what Wim Wenders thinks about it …

Here’s first thoughts from Richard Moore, an American in Ireland for ten years or so, and author of Escaping the Matrix:

From rkm@quaylargo.com:

Sad news today. The normally intelligent people of Ireland capitulated to a fear-mongering propaganda campaign, and voted for the Lisbon Treaty, 2:1.

National sovereignty in all of Europe is now a thing of the past. The “Treaty” is in fact a constitution, and all European national constitutions are now subservient to the terms of this self-amending Treaty.

‘Self-amending’ is all important: it means that the Brussels bureaucracy can add add new amendments to the Treaty at any time, and those amendments also supersede national constitutions. The Irish people were told that the Treaty “does not bring in military conscription”, “does not affect taxation”, and many other things that people in Ireland are not in favor of.

This was all lies. True, the Treaty itself does not talk about those specific items, but because of self-amending, those specific items can now “be brought in” at any time in the future. And Ireland’s voting power, in opposing measures, is very greatly reduced by the Treaty.

If the Treaty were a ‘good’ constitution, all of this might not be a bad thing. But it’s not. The structure of the EU government is very much less democratic than any of the current European governments.

Most of the power is vested in the EU Commission, none of whose members are elected. It’s like a Politburo, with lots of power and no accountability. And its polices are very much oriented around neoliberalism, globalism, privatization, and deregulation – the very things that have brought the global economy to a standstill and accelerated unemployment in Europe.

Both Holland and France had voted against the constitution, when it was openly called a constitution. So the bigwigs repackaged the very same thing and called it a “Treaty”. They did this so the people of France and Holland wouldn’t get another chance to vote it down. The “Treaty” could be passed by the legislatures – except in the case of Ireland.

The people of Ireland, God bless them, voted against the “Treaty” the first time they were given a chance to vote. But they weren’t able to keep their heads in the face of the overwhelming media blitz about how the world would fall apart if Ireland voted No a second time.

Europe is now under the firm control of a handful of unaccountable elitists in the EU Commission. Where they will take Europe is anybody’s guess, and there will be no democratic voice present in setting that direction.

Today will live in infamy, as its consequences become visible.

END QUOTE

General Krulak, son of Brute,
blasts Cheney re Torture.
Very interesting! But …

On September 11 (weeks ago), two high-ranking generals came out of retirement to hit Cheney on the head about torture. Interesting but odd.

Their Op Ed was published in The Miami Herald: “Fear was No Excuse to Condone Torture.”

Well and good. But also a bit odd. Is there nothing current behind it? Torture, per se, is no longer an issue. Cheney seems history.

And note that one of the generals — former Marine Commandant Charles Krulak — bears a name that rings in the annals of American postwar history.

In the 1960s (and maybe 50s, under CIA auspices), Marine General Victor “Brute” Krulak was involved in the energetic effort to win in Vietnam. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty worked closely with him, and has written a lot about him.

Relevant bits in a nutshell: Prouty says that Brute, atop the Marine staff in the Pentagon in the early 60s, became a close ally and advisor to JFK in the effort to turn the Vietnam policy around.

The McNamara-Taylor of October 2, 1963 — supposedly the findings of the Secretary of Defense and JFK’s special advisor General Maxwell Taylor on their grand tour of Vietnam — was principally authored by Krulak, Prouty & co, working closely with the White House — and then placed in McNamara & Taylor’s hands, for the sake of the cameras, as they returned from their mission.

That is: The policy change this much publicized report effected was sold using Taylor’s and McNamara’s names, but was actually the thinking and initiative of JFK’s narrow circle, which at this moment included, on the brassy side, Brute and his assistant Fletch. (Thus spake Prouty.)

1. Is Marine Gen. Charles C. Krulak the son of Marine Gen. Victor Krulak? Shouldn’t be hard to find out, I guess.

Uh yes — that’s a roger. Charles is the son of Victor.

2. Why is Charles coming out of retirement to hit the retired Cheney on the head now?

3. Are you playing the Preakness pool?

Humor: Hitler prepares for annual Burning Man fest

I come to this late but …

I Spy +
Heart of Darkness =
Apocalypse Now

Watch this episode — “The Warlord” — from I Spy, the late 60s show, then please comment as to whether it may have inspired (along with the Conrad) FF Coppola’s masterpiece a few years later.

The credits say that the episode was written by Robert Culp — the actor sharing the spotlight with Smokin’ Bill Cosby.

And at the very end one discovers the name of the actor playing the Warlord …

Also please comment on how it could be that television departed from this place circa 1969 (when The Name of the Game was airing “The White Birch” about the collapse of the Prague Spring) and ended up where it is today, where international affairs are treated in comic-book video-game fashion on the vile 24.

Local Color

Dem wuz da daze …

Alex Jones Documentary:
The Obama Deception

I don’t agree with some detail here but it’s certainly worth chewing on, particularly as we watch Obama sleepwalk (?) into the Pakghanistan quagmire.
The DVD can be ordered from Alex Jones’s web site: http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/obdedvd.html

All of the Youtube segments are gathered on one page here: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=josh99smith&view=videos.

But this may be a handier way to access them:

Part 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23h4IlRQGZ8&feature=channel_page

Part 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHiENcsO10Q&feature=channel_page

Part 3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjLUkAuT2AA&feature=channel_page

Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY-8snkdpyE&feature=channel_page

Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqHi4kmnO2Y&feature=channel_page

Part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWZvBMkZkM4&feature=channel_page

Part 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnkbPsfTLyw&feature=channel_page

Part 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKqd4UAG8kQ&feature=channel_page

Part 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMB3gxk4jg&feature=channel_page

Part 10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAmQnUQFG4o&feature=channel_page

Part 11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1fD7D0xcc&feature=channel_page

Part 12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAJAb52PVUw&feature=channel_page

Part 13 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Ija31HdUs&feature=channel_page

Part 14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_6sYwMQLLU&feature=channel_page

Dept of Army Suicide
and Immigration:
General Freakley
finds himself unmanned

Ed Note: See comments below to follow the horrible story of escalating veteran suicides across time.

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From the Times:

“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army.

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END QUOTE

General Freakley went on to unveil a new citizenship program that fast-tracks foreigners who speak particular languages. Green Card to Passport in six months.

Seem to recall some Caeser doing something like this.

Guess they must be running out of peeps — oh. Oh my.

Still, a bit odd. Army Recruitment handing out passports. Thought the State Department did that. And Immigration the whole naturalization thing …

And I seem to recall Secretary of State Clinton making a particular point, during her first address from Foggy Bottom, of reclaiming turf and powers lost across recent years to the Pentag–

Hey! You can’t –!  Where are my Switzers?! Stop that! General Freakley, who’s in charge here?! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!!!

Dr Strangelove, I presume? 

Who’s the gadfly?

Further developments.

Who’s who …

JFK: Dallas Deputy Sheriff
Roger Craig speaks

I didn’t know this doc from 1976 was on the web. 

It features a lengthy interview with hero Roger Craig, a Deputy Sheriff in Dallas who, among other things:

– was on the trail of a Grassy Knoll assassin within moments of the murder, and

– was present when the rifle of the Book Depository was discovered and found to be a sharpshooter’s Mauser (not the old Italian soldier’s rifle that the Warren Commission reported and attributed to Lee Oswald).

Pressing these differences across the years seems to have cost Mr Craig his life. From the excellent Spartacus vault run by John Simkin in England:

In 1973 a car forced Craig’s car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident.
In 1974 he surviving another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas.
The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him.
Roger Craig was found dead on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Craig’s suiciding prompted another hero, the attorney Mark Lane, author of two of the most important books on the subject, to put together this documentary, based on a filmed interview conducted with Craig in 1974.

Very much worth watching. Five parts, all there on YouTube.

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It’s hard to always look away …

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Paul Newman

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Thoughts looking back . . .

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Michael Moore film — SLACKER UPRISING — Free Stream

Far as I can tell this was just released yesterday.

A record of his 2004 campaign to depose Bush-Cheney.  Nothing earthshaking but perhaps worth recalling.

Free streaming online at SlackerUprising.Com.

Zeitgeist – The Movie

Has everyone already seen this?

At attempt to deconstruct powers at war with humanity.

Seems the work of Libertarians (just a guess), with whom I  never quite agree.

Nevertheless worth chewing on.

Smaller bits of the whole are available on YouTube.

PBS Frontline doc: Bush’s War

Anyone who has followed the Iraq war in the press, on the web and in the film documentaries already out there, will find little new to chew on in Frontline’s new Bush’s War.

Most troubling: The show opens with 9/11 — and never looks back. Thus presents the war entirely as a reaction to the attacks. Not a word of events and trends prior thereto.

Yet war with Iraq (as Colin Powell and Paul O’Neill have each told us) was on the agenda at Bush-Cheney’s first NSC meeting in January 2001.

The account of the war’s origins, then, is grossly false by omission.

The one bit of news (to my ears) re origins came in a clip of Richard Armitage, who says that Ahmed Chelabi (the Likud lobby’s disinformative nominee to run Iraq post Mission Accomplished) had explicitly promised his Beltway sponsors that his new Baghdad would recognize Israel.

Yet of the PNAC gang only Wolfowitz seems to bear some responsibility in the film — while Perle and baby Kristol, rather scandalously, are present as commentators, rather than examined as agents of the war.

Thus the prime motive of many of the two dozen Beltway activists who made the war happen — “to secure the realm” of Israel, as Perle & co. put it in the first Clean Break memo — escapes Frontline unnoticed.

Instead: hours of detail, often focused on personality, re disputes among the administration’s celebrities. As if the war were the crapulous fallout of a power-elite swing party gone wrong. Smartest Guys in the Room …

… go in with eyes wide shut…?

(?!!?)

It seems a quarter of the air time in Part One (covering the lead-up) is devoted to Secretary of State Powell’s humiliations in battle with the Dark Side, the latter which gets represented chiefly by Rumsfeld and Cheney.

As a result of this eccentric montage, an innocent viewer might come away thinking that the war had no cause beyond Rummy’s hubris and Cheney’s colitis, and was Powell’s fault — that it sprung from Grand Old animus for Saddam acted out as a terrible comedy of errors, rather than from a strategy first publicized in 1992 and a plan first devised in 1996 by American lobbyists working at a Jerusalem think tank.

In short: This wooly 4.5 hour mammoth delivers almost nothing new, and seems in important part a whitewash.

(The distracting concentration on Powell may have followed simply from the fact that his people — Undersecretary Armitage and Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson — were among the few players willing to talk to the camera — a classic pitfall for film documentary. Wolfowitz was smart enough to refuse to participate.)

Credits indicate that the film’s ideas were entirely the work of two men, Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore, who between them fill the roles of reporter, writer, producer and director. Perhaps more people should have been involved.

Frontline made its name in the 80s as the tube’s best vehicle of investigative journalism. Funny thing is that to sketch the origins of the war today, little investigation would be needed, the outline of things having long been public, if absent from television.

It seems more and more, then, that PBS, like NPR, somewhere along the line fell asleep, and fell victim to the pod people at the Manufacturers of Consent Associa-

-tion. (Thinking here, too, of Jim Lehrer’s manly neutering of the old MacNeil-Lehrer Report, which on occasion in the 70s and 80s had some bite.)

One supposes money had something to do with it.

My own Little Jimmy Grimaldi thoughts about why the war happened are encapsulated here.

A big question that still puzzles: How and why did Dubya hire the PNAC gang — long-standing enemies of his father beneath the GOP big top — to advise his 2000 campaign, and then to run his foreign policy? The story on its surface seems slick with bathos and Shakespearean blood … Cheney seems to have been the go-between …

But we have no word on this from Kirk and Gilmore, who never draw near the question.

Maybe Mel Brooks is the man to show in moving images the sickening story of how this war was made and sold.

“This is it! This play won’t last a day!”

Springtime for Saddam …

Was it really Bush’s war?