Penal Lights

What we’ve got is a failure to communicate. Naturally, otherwise there’s no need to use force. Sometimes nothing is a pretty cool hand. True, but it’s also an empty hand–or rather, a hand with only one card.

Cool Hand Luke is an exercise in American eschatology. Paul Newman’s eggshell pieta sans Mary proffers salvation as smile, a bright quiet riposte to the “necessity” of force. You can break the man, put him in a box, or on a cross. But the smile is public. It means hope and perseverance. That is another way of saying that it means life. This is the body–a wonderful thing. But that damn smile–that’s something else.

So far so good. But why American? What’s American in it? Providence. Luke smiles because he doesn’t know what else to do. His barn-bound speech with God asks for a better hand–but quickly changes to chuckle, as if to say, “Right. Nothing. Well that’s one on me.” Luke’s cool hand is on loan. And he’s cool with that.

It’s the other prisoners, the other “sinners” who need his card, who never read his “nothing” as such. Luke’s death is not beside the point. It is the point that makes general a failure to communicate. The breakable party quits the scene, unbroken. At least, publicly. And the film closes with the chain-gang at a cross-roads. If redemption is not yet arrived, it is revealed, and that is all we can ask, or trust–because faith is at stake. Luke’s halogen ain’t halcyon, ain’t nostalgia: it’s divine pluck.

But he’d just shrug about that. Sometimes nothing is a pretty cool hand.

Pirates and Emperors

Dark Passion Play hits Oct. 2nd

Long live Finnish power metal! I can’t help it, I’m stoked about the new Nightwish. I’ve worn the digital grooves off my copy of their last album, Once. Expect full coverage of the new album right here. In the meantime, here’s “Amaranth,” the first single:

Rev. Lennox Yearwood

was prevented from entering to hear general Betrayus address congress last week. He was beaten by the police and hospitalized. This is his response:

What’s the definition of a liberal?

Answer: A person who can see both sides of a lynching.

SHAME. SHAME on John Kerry for standing by and watching a student being held down get tazored for exercising his constitutionally protected freedom of speech. The student wanted to know why Kerry turned his back on electoral fraud in Ohio and thus ignored ballots that could have won him the white house. A good, legitimate question.

And even if it wasn’t. Shame on the worthy senator for standing by his rostrum without saying anything while a kid gets hurt for having the courage to say something.

The youtube video below is sickening. You hear the kid being tortured by campus police. Disgusting.

Our America

Raccoon and I reconvened our film club on Thursday. We watched Spike Lee’s 25th Hour.

In thinking about the film I found myself wanting to call it elegiac but hopeful. Coming shortly after 9/11, the film is saturated with visuals invoking the absence of the two towers and construction at Ground Zero. At one point several workers in protective gear are shown hoeing what for all practical purposes appears to be a crater on the moon. This is Spike Lee’s New York, after the tragedy. A qualified tragedy, because Spike Lee has Francis discourse while looking at the the workers on ground zero about profiting from other’s pain. The towers, as symbol of American capitalism, were a sign of just such profiting. On a small, allegorical scale, Monty’s drug dealing profits from the pain of the people he services.

Hope is what happens when Monty can identify with other people, a little boy on the bus, the various ethnic communities in New York, after he is beaten up so that he’ll be less pretty in jail (see Raccoon on the repetition of the male rape motif). Monty’s face is to be taken as indicative of the gaping wound at Ground Zero. At the end of the film, his father narrates an imaginary journey westward toward a new beginning, rather than Monty’s going to jail. In every frame of this journey Lee presents a flag or some combination of red, white, and blue. The symbolism is heavy handed and, at least for this non-patriotic viewer, strangely moving. “It’s a beautiful country” Monty’s father intones, as they drive through rural America toward Monty’s New Canaan. The hope is that in time Monty will be able to be rejoined by Naturelle, his girlfriend, and they’ll have a prosperous multiethnic family that resembles, and is, American. By extension, Spike Lee suggests that after the trauma, America, like Monty, might rejoin the world, having learned something about the suffering of others on 9/11.

That America did not, need hardly be written. I kept asking myself, for what is 25th Hour an elegy? Not the prelapsarian United States. No, the elegiac quality is something I bring to the film. It is my mourning for what we as a country, what our “elected” leaders, did not do: embrace the world. I’m not talking about a flaccid liberal embrace. I’m talking about general strike until we straighten shit out. No more profit.

We learned nothing. Naomi Klein has an article about what she calls “disaster capitalism and the new economy of catastrophe” in the October Harpers. She suggests that whereas instability in the past was assumed to be bad for markets, on the contrary it is now a tremendous growth industry. Firms like Blackwater, Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, KBR, and CH2M Hill provide security and services in Iraq and New Orleans for those who can afford them in absence of a government that provides those basic services: security, electricity, water. Thus traumatized places are divided into red and green zones. In the red zones the damned pursue their dieing. The green zones are protected oases for the few. Every time infrastructure fails, private companies, with private priorities, are called to sort it out.

Private firms become a government within a government when the federal government turns over many of its basic functions to contractors. FEMA, Klien points out, hired contractors to hire contractors in New Orleans. The result is that you have tax dollars going to these firms as though they were the government, but none of the accountability. These firms, unlike many corporations that like to hedge their bets, direct 70-90 percent of their political donations to the republican party. The party of small government. The party for whom armeggeden is the just deserts of those who cannot pay, as Klein also suggests, to escape it. Catastrophes are a growth industry. So too is privatized government. The result is simple: fascism.

So my mourning is for the lost opportunity in Spike Lee’s visual metaphor. We took, if you’ll forgive the expression, the road already taken and went to Blackwater’s jail. Lee knows that there is no guarantee we were going to behave differently. He ends with a shot of Monty’s bruised face, and the ambiguous decision which way to go, prison or out there–in that beautiful beyond. We chose the camps.

Best Metal Band 2007

Is Darkest Hour. Hands Down. Nobody else is close. The new album Deliver Us from which comes the vid below is enough to keep me up at night. It’s that good. I’m blown away.

A Rant for 9/11

General BetrayUs and the republicants continue to conflate Iraq and 9/11. Their mouthholes move on tv. And like a moth I hover over the screen and I wait for signs. What does it take to get together a bunch of people to go throw bricks, stones, anything to hand at the federal building downtown? I’m on strike today and explained to students that it’s because I’m sick. It’s true. I’m sick of war. I’m sick of watching geriatric white men get people dead and have the audacity to lie to our faces about it.

I’m sick of the impotence of being reduced to idle thoughts of brick throwing. And while my fantasies keep me busy, I can know that innocent people continue to be butchered, tortured, and consigned to hells I can’t even imagine so that Halliburton gets their cost-plus contracts and the US maintains its “influence” in the Middle East.

I’ve spoken out about the war. At school. To people. In Washington. Before it started. I know that words are just words, while barbarism is our foreign policy.

What do you do with despair?
Organize. Organize. Organize.

students for Obama

prosumed innocence