Volume 34

JULY-AUGUST 2006

34. 8: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, 1955 [MR] 8.28.2006

Dean and Allen prepare for their famous “chicken” run © WB

It's night, and the only illumination is from the glaring lights of the cars and hotrods convened on a high seaside bluff in Southern California. Buzz Gunderson, black, pomaded hair over black leather jacket, and Jim Stark, in a deep red windbreaker, walk in silence to the edge of a cliff high above the Pacific. Buzz pulls a lit cigarette from Jim's mouth, as friends might do, and takes a drag.

“This is the edge. That's the end,” Buzz states with only the slightest hint of fear.

“Yeah. It certainly is.”

“You know something? I like you. You know that?” He's a rough-looking young man, but Buzz sounds sincere. Earlier in the day they were at knifepoint for no better reason than they are now about race stolen cars toward the edge of this cliff to see which is “chicken.”

“Why do we do this?” Jim asks, but it is not a sign of retreat.

“You got to do something, now don't you?” Buzz says with a resignation tinged with sadness.

Then, Jim (James Dean), and Buzz (Corey Allen) walk back toward their cars to finish one of the now classic scenes in American youth film history—the “chicken run” in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause . In many respects Buzz's words, which turn out to be near his last, were an anthem for the spate of films that emerged in the early 1950s, films about bikers terrorizing small towns ( The Wild One, 1953 ), or unruly inner city high school boys menacing their teachers ( Blackboard Jungle, 1955 ), films about cars and girls who admired the boys who drove them, films about sexual frustration, inter-generational tension, and mostly, about confused identity. They were films about, and for, the new, post WWII generation of American youth who had not only the mobility and privacy afforded by their cars, but also their own music, dress, and culture, and the sense of identity and direction those things did not provide and the repressed anger and rebelliousness they did.

Rebel Without a Cause is the seminal American film of the generation of youth in the American city at mid-century. But to appreciate its place of prominence we must look at the experience of youth in both the real and cinematic urban place in a broader sweep, perhaps holding Buzz Gunderson's last question in quest of some answer. Back in 1955, Jim and Buzz were not only overlooking a cliff out into the vast Pacific, they were also standing on the cusp of a momentous social change in America—the emergence of the generation of youth.

By the mid-fifties surveys by movie producers had shown that a quarter of movie attendees were between fifteen and twenty-five years of age. Their titles, The Delinquents (1957) , Dragstrip Girl (1957), Hot Rod Rumble (1957) ; Reform School Girl (1957) ; High School Confidential (1958) ; I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) (followed by Teenage Frankenstein, Cave Man, Monster, etc. ) tell the story well enough. Most of their themes were thinly-veiled, and often pathetic, attempts to express youth's rebellion, against not being understood, even though youth did not quite understand itself.

Rebel might just well be the classic youth film, permuting all the elements of the youth culture: the social adjustments of high school, cars, manhood rites, dysfunctional families, repressed sexuality, and early death. Only rock and roll does not play a significant role. However, early death may well be responsible for giving Rebel its cult status. Buzz “wins” the chickie run, but only because his leather jacket becomes ensnared in the door handle, and he plunges over the cliff to a fiery end. Dean, who was a twenty-four year old “teenager” at the time he made Rebel, died shortly thereafter in a real car crash, becoming the first “martyr” of the tormented teenager generation. Co-stars Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood also met tragic premature deaths by murder and drowning respectively. [1]

There seems to be little guidance on “what to do” from the parents of these young rebels. They are almost ridiculous stereotypes, eating dinner in suburban homes in jackets and ties (mom wearing pearls), and completely misunderstanding the angst of their offspring. Jim's father is cowardly, uxorious, and indecisive, lacking every trait Jim needs in paternal guidance. His mother is a social climber. It is little different for Judy (Natalie Wood), who still wants to be a little girl who can kiss her father, but is physically filled out to be provocative to an adult male. “You're too old for that stuff!” her father scolds after rebuffing her affection with a slap, then apologizes by addressing her with a cutesy, childish nickname. Given that, Plato (Sal Mineo) doesn't know how good he has it to have divorced parents who are not ever home. He's cared for by a nanny, a large, sympathetic Black woman, who seems the best “parent” of the lot.

If the rebellion was against sexual norms of the times there is little evidence of it in Rebel . Jim seems only mildly infatuated with Judy, looking more for a friend than a sexual encounter. Their love scene in the old mansion near the end of the film is tepid and innocent, and the scene is rather suffused with allusion to family, especially with Plato's bonding to the young couple as surrogate parents. The implication is that they just might just be better “parents” to each other than their bumbling natural parents have been.

A sub-theme of Rebel relates to geographic mobility. Jim complains that his family is always relocating (ambiguously) to “protect him.” He is always trying to fit in, to adjust, needing to make new friends, but is always awkward at it, provoking tough guys to call him “chicken” and, in his (on screen) lack of “coolness,” putting off girls. In some sense Jim's plight relates to demographic changes in the American urban landscape. The film was made at a time when more parents could move to the suburbs to avoid unsavory urban influences on their children. But that was attended by a dislocation that required social skills for “fitting in” and dealing with the forms of prejudice and exclusion that prevail in such situations.

Rebel made James Dean the first youth film icon. With his mumbling, naturalistic delivery, his red jack of rebellion (which he is forever giving away), and in his real life, early death, guaranteeing his eternal youth, he was the forerunner of a hoard of youth entertainment media stars.

By the 1960s youth had found a cause or causes: racism, feminism and Vietnam (partly led by their surrogate father Dr. Spock). The rebellion turned political. It also provided a basis for another revolution that had been brewing—the so-called “sexual revolution”. If young people, even ensconced in their university dormitories, could take on weighty issues of society, then they were entitled, they seemed to reason, to act in other ways like adults. In fact, by engaging political and social issues, they had found a means to give social leverage to their age cohort. Accordingly, music, dress, and film began to reflect these changes. With events, such as Woodstock, youth culture began to create its own private history to go with its newfound culture of rebellion.

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[1] Remaining “young forever” has also been achieved by several others in the youth star pantheon, among them Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Freddie Prinz, Jim Morrison, Curt Cobain, and River Phoenix

34. 7: IS THERE LIFE AFTER WORK? 8.22.2006

“America's Finest City,” as it likes to call itself, just shelled out $20 Million to some accounting firm that took it to the cleaners for producing a report on the culpability of what public officials, by neglect, corrupt practices, or both, shoved this rich city to the brink of bankruptcy. There's enough in that saga to regale our good readers on the subject of corruption of the public trust that sleazes down from the Republicans in Washington to the Republicans in San Diego. But I take the present theme from what some argue is the cause of that threatening bankruptcy—the pension fund for public employees.

First, a disclaimer. I am a public employee pensioner, but even if I were not, I would not join the chorus of anti-government types who begrudge every penny in the public fisc that they would rather see expended to buy hummers or pull slots at the local casino. But there is a larger issue, one that transcends San Diego—and the ken of right-wing morons—and that is the relationship of retirement to the economic system. What are the consequences of an expanding social cohort who spend increasingly protracted, un-productive, and expensive periods in retirement.

For most if human history there was no retirement—no going on cruises to watch glaciers fall off Alaska, no riding around in golf carts or sitting in HMO waiting rooms. People fell over at whatever kind of work they did to keep themselves alive, and that was that. If they lived long enough to become unproductive, like the Eskimo women whose teeth fell out, they were left behind, or on an ice floe, as polar bear lunch. No getting your hair blue-permed and going to the casino, no puttering with your boat or motor home; if you didn't produce, you were history.

People never expected that they would need a “nest egg,” pensions, 401Ks, mutual funds, reverse mortgages, and a medical plan that covers organ replacement, a dental plan that covers implants, and a vision plan that lets you read the DMV eye chart so you can get a license at an age when you grandparents were already dead for forty years. They never figured they would to put enough away for several years in a comfortable retirement or nursing home. People never expected that they might have a stage of life after their working years that could be almost as long as the period of their working years. They never used to figure that they needed a good pension plan to take them through those years. [1]

The economy never figured on this either. But these people are using up one hell of a lot of resources. They create pollution, clog the streets, freeways and aisles of supermarkets, use oil, and they spend a lot of money—the great part of it in the last few years of their lives—on health care, pharmaceuticals, nursing homes, and medical procedures. In the process they engender lot of jobs; retirement homes have to be built, geriatric centers, hospitals, drug companies. But is it all worth it? A guy spends thirty years selling life insurance, then retires and spends almost as much as he made for another thirty years of sitting around.

You can see where I'm going with this (or the corner I'm painting myself into). Are we approaching so sort of zero sum circumstance where people build up a pile of capital and then expend it during a period of economic indolence and non-productivity? Is that the concern than underlies the concern about Social Security—as the length of retirement extends and the consumption of health care that attends it expands with it, can the working cohort support the non-working cohort? And then, what happens when they get to retirement age?

As fewer and fewer people do not drop over at work and have a long period of retirement to look forward to they naturally become more concerned about their nest egg. CEOs just negotiate multi-million dollar salaries and stock deals, which they often get for screwing the workers out of the pensions they have vested with the companies they run into the ground. There are no longer any guarantees that all those pension contributions will be there when you're ready to wind your gold watch and hop in the golf cart. If you worked for Enron, or any number of airlines and other corporations you didn't need to be told that.

But Municipal corporations are no less vulnerable to this trap. San Diego's politicians—long hampered by Proposition 13 and subsequent Republican administrations that like to play games so they won't have to ask people for taxes—got themselves in a big mess playing with public employees pensions. Now those republicans that like long term debt rather than asking for taxes can't even float a bond because the city is fiscally unsound. Those pesky pensioners are expensive for municipal corporations as well. [2]

So, should we just line those pensioners up and shoot them? Of course not. After all, I am retired myself. Maybe I'm just beating up on my fellow retirees because I am in denial about being in their cohort. [3] Anyway, I'm still trying to be “productive”—if you can call bugging people with essays like this “being productive.”

Well, OK, you can shoot the guy I saw the other day wearing a sly grin and the T-shirt that said in big letters “I'M RETIRED, Do it Yourself.” Him you can shoot.

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[1] Of course there were no guarantees that there would be anything left by the time they breached retirement. Inflation might suck most of the purchasing power from their nest egg, or, if you vested with an Enron, an airlines, or other larcenous American corporation you might spend your retirement years as a Wal Mart greeter.

[2] Ironically, New York City, which was often cited by San Diegans as the liberal spending sort of city has a better pension situation than San Diego. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/nyregion/20pensionside.html?ex=1156737600&en=112d77e45d111d13&ei=5070&emc=eta1

[3] OK, I will confess. I have a “senior” Octopus Pass that I use on the transit in Hong Kong, and used my senior status for a cheaper plane ticket and movie theater admission.

34. 6: ASIAN EYES 8.16.2006

Anna May Wong ca. 1930s

Americans are only recently having to get accustomed to being spied upon by their own government. In other countries having one's government's eyes on you or into your affairs is almost de rigeur . I once tested the legendary story about the espionage in the renowned Rossia Hotel in Moscow. It was said that one could sit in their room and complain that there were towels and presently there would be a house maid at your door with the towels. Those were in the old CCCP days.

Now the recent controversy over the Bush Administration giving the NSA authority to poke into our affairs reminded of an incident in which I thought I was the subject of espionage several years ago and in a faraway city.

I was traveling with my friend Sue in Guilin, China several years ago when she whispered to me as we were inspecting the wares of some stalls on the Li River quayside in the late evening: “We've been being followed for the past fifteen minutes. There are two men over your left shoulder. No! Don't look!. They're staring at us now.”

We moved on to another stall and I walked around the other side of it to snatch a look at the two “spies”. There were two men, short in stature, probably in their late thirties, dressed in the thin white cotton shirts, worn loose over the plain baggy trousers commonplace on men throughout China. They were unremarkable in any other respect than the thinner of the two had that lean handsomness of Zhou En Lai. Perfect cover for spies. But I didn't think they were spies, or even interested in us.

“Yeah, we should have left our plans for our new intercontinental missile system back in the hotel room,” I said, dismissing her concern.

“No really, they keep following us and staring at us; they keep getting closer and closer,” she insisted.

“Maybe they're just pickpockets. Just keep a good hold on your bag.” I advised, unconcerned. “Anyway, you know how unabashed the Chinese are about staring at foreigners. Two gray-hairs like us must seem like extraterrestrials to some of these people.”

But as we walked on they did indeed continue to follow us, moving when we did, stopping as we did. But the quayside was busy with people, and the likelihood of their trying anything, even a purse-snatching, seemed remote. Nevertheless, my cautious instincts were now aroused.

A few minutes later, at a stall where I was examining a small abacus that was cleverly “antiqued” to allow the vendor to say “Tang. Tang Dynasty” When I picked it up, I felt the telltale wallet-probing “bump” of a pickpocket on my left buttock. Nerves already on alert I wheeled to grab the offender, but instead of grabbing a larcenous arm or hand I came up with a little shaven head that reached only as high as my waist. In fact I would not have been able to grab an arm or a hand. The little boy whose head I quickly released had no arms at all .

What he did have was a bright, warm smile on a cute, if somewhat mischievous face. He spoke a few phrases of local dialect of which I had no comprehension, but I did notice a small cloth bag hanging from a cord around his neck. He repeated his words and this time motioned downward with his head, looking at the bag and then up to me.

“I think he wants you to put something in his bag,” Sue said. The lady behind the table at the stall said something that might have meant the same in Chinese. Her voice had a high-pitched scolding tone in it, so she mighyt have been admonishing the boy.

Other than my camera I had only money, having neglected to bring the ballpoint pens I usually carried to give to kids. I dug into my pocket for some of the smaller “foreign exchange certificates” or FEC that China required us to use in those days, and tucked them into the little fellow's bag.

“Xie xie, xie xie ni,” he said, his smile now even wider. Then he bumped his little shaved head against my hip a couple of times, smiled and dissolved into the crowd.

“Do you think he was a Thalidomide child?” I asked Sue. She had worked for years with kids with disabilities in schools, and would know.

“No, he's too young, and his arms are completely missing, not stunted or atrophied,” she pointed out.

What an extraordinary boy, I thought, with such a genuine smile for someone so disabled. That smile lingered in my mind, like the Cheshire Cat's. But now we were walking on down the quay, and the “spies” lingered as well, more corporeally.

Sue was getting more nervous about them and suggested we not press our luck and head back to the hotel, but I didn't like that fact that they were intimidating us. “I'm gonna confront them,” I blurted, surprising even myself, and I could hear her objection behind me as I turned impulsively and strode as menacingly as I could in their direction.

They were leaning against a tree, one of them smoking a cigarette, and seemed quite surprised that I was heading straight at them. The smoker, who looked like Zhou En Lai, quickly tossed his cigarette aside and some fleeting thought flashed that I was about to get into it with two expert martial artists. But the adrenaline was pumping and I was committed.

Just about to open my mouth to thunder: “Alright you two cowboys, just what the hell do you think you're doing following . . .” when one of them forced a smile on his face, a silver-crowned incisor catching a glint of the streetlamp.

“Heh-row, heh-row,” he said nervously, but cheerily, “soooah nice to make yerrr aquaintrance.” Then, without missing a beat, as though he had been rehearsing his words, he quickly, but carefully added: “Sir, I am teacher of Engrish, excuse prease, EngLISH, in Guilin high-school. My correague and I are preased to meet you.” His nervous haste obviously forced him into the almost “classic” tongue-twisters English presents to Chinese. He extended his hand and I could feel the tension drain out of me.

Our reciprocal civilities completed, for the remainder of the evening we had the company of our two “spies” who were interested only in eavesdropping to acquire the secret of our American-accented English. My bold assault now provided them an opportunity for real conversation. We walked along the quay in the balmy Guilin evening answering questions about vocabulary, grammar and syntax, rather than being tortured for the locations of American missile silos in Montana or Strategic Air Command codebooks.

Our “spies” were friendly, humorous, and grateful for the time we took with them, especially since they had never been out of China and only rarely had an opportunity to speak with “native” English-speakers. But before we parted with mutual good wishes, I asked them about the little boy without arms. Did they know him? They certainly had observed my encounter with him.

They smiled and said the boy's name. Of course they knew him, they said. He is a boy who lost both his parents, and both his arms, in a fire in his home. He is now cared for by all the neighbors on the street where he lives with one of the families. He is well-fed and clothed, and goes to school with the other children they assured me, but “he needs a little money, too” they explained.

Later, as we were about to board a boat to observe the fishermen who use trained cormorants to do their fishing for them we saw the armless little boy again, bumping his head against tourists and trying to make himself understood. He smiled over, but did not importune for a second contribution.

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34. 5: Shhhhhhhsh! I'VE GOT A SECRET 8.12.2006

The “enigma machine” (WWII)

A few years ago I met a guy over a cup of coffee at the café I frequent. The usual café protocols we exchanged: first names and what we do for a living. Having given mine he gave his name and then said that he worked for a part of the government he couldn't specify that undertook unspecifiable, clandestine operations for the country.

“You mean you can't even tell me the name of the part of my government that you work for?” I asked, not really that curious.

“I could,” he said, almost seeming to relish the chance to give his reply, “but then I would have to kill you.” He smirk-smiled.

My BDM* needle hit the peg in the red zone. He also sported a “Semper Fi” tattoo on one forearm (but why didn't he roll up the other sleeve?) the military haircut, and the requisite thin mustache. “I can tell you that I was trained as a Navy SEAL,” he offered as a consolation, or maybe as proof that he could kill me if he had to, or maybe because he was another of a number of poseurs who happened to frequent the café until they were “found out.” He's been long gone for years.

I don't remember his name, but I remember the encounter every time it pops up in some espionage thriller Tom Clancy type film. These days I remember it when I hear George Bush, or one of his minions get up and plays “The Secrecy Card.” The SC has been a part of our government since well-before 9-11. “National Security” has long been an appropriate and abused excused from keeping information from the general public. Traitors, terrorists, and other bad people are out there in the general public and could use such information against us. The corollary is . . . ahem . . . that the bad who can do harm to us are never in the government and never those who have the authority and the prerogative of the SC.

But the Bush administration has taken secrecy to new depths. From its uninformative and taciturn press secretaries from whose pronouncements we come away knowing even less, to its “renditions” of prisoners, military tribunals, torture programs, and now spying on the communications of its own citizens, secrecy in government begins to rival those of infamous authoritarian regimes. Member of congressional committees that are supposed to be brought into decisions are ignored, and the judicial oversight of various surveillance and information gathering techniques of the FBI, CIA and NSA have been ignored. The resulting outcry and outrage have been dismissed with either assertions that thye administration is doing nothing illegal (certainly in terms of their legal lackeys like Alberto Gonzales and John Woo), or playing to the cheap seats with assertions that it would be preferable for Americans to have their phones tapped than to be blown up by Al Qaeda.

Actually, all of this probably gives Al Qaeda a good chuckle, especially when, at the same time we are spying on ourselves, it is an open secret that it has been rather easy for millions of illegal aliens to penetrate our porous borders and our scarcely protected ports.

This is another expression of the philosophy of the present regime that has often been denounced in these pages—that for them, the ends justify the means. If it must abridge freedom to protect freedom, to burn the village to save it, there is no contradiction in such reasoning.

The secrecy thing is, of course, a Catrch-22. (“I've got a secret. Oh, what is it? If I told you it wouldn't be a secret.”) In government things are kept secret for purposes of ”national security.” But there is no way for an outsider to judge whether it is worthy of being kept secret because it's a secret. There is, then, not way of determining if “national security” might be being used as a smoke screen for other motives an administration might have for keeping secrets.

Such an atmosphere feeds all sorts of suspicions and even cottage industries like the UFO enthusiasts. The UFO types have been maintaining for years that the government is keeping secret information they have about visitations of extraterrestrials. That the government might be keeping secret experiments with highly-classified vehicles and weapons will never be accepted by people who now refer to themselves as “Ufologists,” a “discipline” that deals with the “knowledge” about what is either unidentified, or secret. This is where it all becomes rather insane: the ufologists need for whatever might be secret to remain secret because their entire raison d'etre is built on the very notion of secrecy. If there was anything being kept secret its exposure would put them out of a job.

But it doesn't quite work the other way. If you have a secret, or are suspected of having a secret that might be regarded as a matter of national security you are fair game for espionage.

Eventually, policies such as the Bush administration is pursuing break down the essential element in any relationship—trust. They treat us like they don't trust us—even though there are some people who can't be trusted—and we eventually don't trust them to be the guardians of our rights. So, is this what the terrorists might be really trying to do, break down the essential element in our relationship with our government? If so, they have found a compliant administration that is playing right into their hands. “The terrorists win,” to use the phrase that employed for quite different purposes, but by making us terrorize ourselves.

Is this to say that we don't need some secrecy and surveillance. Of course not. But they way this is being conducted in this administration is analogous to the way in which the so-called ‘war on terror” is being conducted—with a blunt instrument that causes a lot of collateral damage.

Ironically, by committing an act of terror the terrorists have succeeded in getting America to wage a “war on terror,” a fallacious metaphor that seems to result in America terrorizing itself. The Bush administration has never explained how one makes a war on a concept, a strategy that exists in no particular place.

How will we know when the war on terror is over, completed, won?

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*Bullshit Detection Meter

34. 4: A FEW BAD APPLES 8.8.2006

The political Right loves sound-bites; simple phrases don't over-tax the limited intellectual capacities of their constituents. Their latest, a knee-jerk response to any suggestion that the American troops/targets in Iraq should be withdrawn is that it would be “cut and run.” They like a phrase that suggests that it would be an act of cowardice to set a deadline for departure even though they can't set a deadline for when the “war on terror” would be “won”. It also suggests that liberals favor cowardice, which fits nicely with their other little mantra “what would the liberals do?” Together they are enough to make a red-stater grab his rifle off the gun rack in his truck and run out and shoot an endangered species, just to show those pinko-commie liberals what brave guys those Republicans are.

Now just what would the triumvirs of our Iraq war know about cutting and running? We have Georgie-boy Bush who cut and ran from even his national guard service, refused to take his physical, and went to take up the good fight of who would pay for the next round at a bar in a neighboring state. Brave fellow, he. And Mr. Rummy, who found a way to wear a Navy uniform for a few years without ever getting near a combat situation; he didn't have top cut and run because he was never there. Oh, and “The Dick” Cheney, who cut and ran to his political spin-meisters as soon as he shot a political contributor who must have an uncanny resemblance to a quail. The Dick is also a master at cutting and running from Draft Boards, which he did with a half-dozen successful deferments because he hand “more important things to do.” Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney, cowards one and all.

These are just the kind of cowards who would also come up with the phrase—“a few bad apples.” You know, like “the few bad apples” (FBA) that pulled that nasty stuff at the Abu Ghraib. FBA provides a nice insulation for the cowardly-insulation from responsibility. By insisting that such incidents as Abu Ghraib, and now, increasingly, incidents in which innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan are killed, cover-ups like the Tillman affair and the killing and framing of an innocent Iraqi man by Marines, are aberrant behavior, allows the prevailing policies to continue and the blame goes no further than the few bad apples who take the fall. We've seen this time and again, and will see more of it. The Marines call for a “Few Good Men” apparently scooped up a “few bad apples,” and the Army has enlisted enough skinheads for a “white supremacy” division.

The lies, contorted reasoning, twisted logic, and deceptions to justify a misguided war of preemption are now spinning things out of control. The public, through polling, now mostly recognizes this—it is the so-called “insurgents” who are calling the shots (and taking them) in Iraq, and the Taliban and warlords who are back on the warpath in Afghanistan. Desperate for “victories” the FBA argument allows the cowards to turn up the American torture machine in gulags in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and in secret locations, although the best they can come up with is arresting a bunch of alleged wannabe terrorists in Florida, who apparently planned to blow up the Hancock building in Chicago with C-4 laced with left-over Florida ballot chads.

The irony is that the more than a “few bad apples” in the highest ranks of the Bush administration have found a way of transferring the blame for the outfall of their ridiculous policies to the people who have to execute them. Condi Rice famously said that the failures in Iraq were mostly “tactical” not strategic. What the hell is this dumbo doing passing on military performance; she of the famous ”historical background” presidential briefing memo? But it put the blame at the bottom of the decision chain. And they try to blame the Democrats for not supporting the troops.

Rumsfeld's cowardly observations on human behavior seem to derive blame from his folksy sociology. “People just do strange things” when you eliminate the government of their country and then stand around and watch them loot it. He says it as though it were an expected outcome. But then that was only a “few bad apples” among the Iraqis, wasn't it.

When Abu Graib hit the screens they were quick to get their scapegoats to trial, low-ranked country people who would disappear quickly and easily. Military justice acts quickly when it is focused on FBAs. The FBAs at the top acted with dismay and outrage at the photographs that made their way around the world and created more terrorists and insurgents than any Al Qaeda appeal might have made. But they quickly characterized it as another anomaly, while at the same time trashed the Geneva Conventions and drafted memos expanding the procedures for torture, and shipping torture victims off on secret flights to secret torture locations. When it comes to detainees, they're all bad apples.

When several retired generals criticized the conduct of the war and called for withdrawing the troops they were regarded as FBAs as well. Generals weren't supposed to “go bad” and recommend “cut and run”; they're supposed to be like Colin Powell and do their duty and remain silent or pass on misinformation in front of the United Nations. And speaking of the UN, what about France and Germany and some of those other “bad apples” who didn't want to play along with Bush and the neo-cons and their “coalition of the willing”?

Scapegoating is the prime tactic of cowards. Faced with danger or the truth there are no bad apples who cut and run faster than Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. That's what happens when your “leadership” comes from the bottom of the barrel.

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34. 3: DESPERATE VOYAGERS , by M. Tokayer and M. Swartz, 1979 [BR] 7.4.2006

The synagogue a few blocks from where I live looks at first, with it Paladian architecture and stained glass windows, like a former Catholic church. But on closer inspection the Star of David and other Jewish motifs give it away. Another incongruity the night I went there to hear a Rabbi from New York speak back in 1986 was the number of Asians in attendance, some of them wearing yarmulkes. The speaker was Marvin Tokayer, who had served as a rabbi to the Jewish community in Tokyo after the war. He was speaking about something that I, along with most people, had never heard about before—a plan by the Japanese during WWII, called “the Fugu Plan.”

My collaborator, the movie director the late Denis Sanders, and I were there to assess the prospects for a documentary on the Fugu Plan. Denis was an Academy Award winning documentarian, and a Jew from a family that dated back to the expulsion from Spain; so who could know better. As it happened we never got very far on that project. Denis died less than a year later. I had Tokayer's book, but I had to move on to other projects and activities. It sat on my shelf for years, but my interest was rekindled when I stumbled on some Jewish motifs on buildings in Shanghai a few years ago. Shanghai had a large refugee Jewish community up to the Communist revolution, and thousands of that community came from, of all places, Japan.

If that sound like a strange set up, it is nothing compared to the saga of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the days leading up to, and during, WWII, a story as strange as the plan named after a puffer fish that is a sushi delicacy, but if not prepared correctly, can kill you. First of all, the Japanese were allies of Nazi Germany, and we know how the Nazis felt about Jews. But it would be a mistake to conclude that the Japanese motives derived from a feelings of pro-Semitism. Rather, the authors of the Fugu Plan were rather calculating and self-interested in rescuing some East European Jews from almost certain extermination at the hands of the Himmler crowd. It was called the Fugu Plan, named after the puffer fish that is a delicacy in Japan, but must be prepared with great care not to cut a organ that contains a deadly poison. People die every year from badly prepared fugu sushi.

Much of the prevailing Japanese attitude about Jews had been shaped by that nasty piece of work of fiction masquerading as fact authored by the Russian Secret Police, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . This virulently anti-Semitic volume of purported minutes of Zionists plotting to control world finance, and other machinations, was the result of the blame Russians placed on the Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution. It continues to shape hatred for Jews and was influential in Japanese attitudes. Ironically, it was a Jewish financier, Jacob Schiff, of New York, who helped finance the Japanese victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war because he hated the Russians for their pogroms against the Jews.

That thickens the plot a good deal. Schiff was a hero to some of the Japanese high military command. So the Japanese figured that good connections with international Jewish money was a good thing. In addition, they were interested in getting Jewish intellectuals, particularly scientists, into their good favor. In fact, they planned to establish their own Jewish colony in their newly-acquired territory in Manchukuo in northern China.

So, how to get the Jews out of the clutches of their allies, the Nazis? As it happened the Japanese hand a consulate in Lithuania and their consul there figured out that, of all places, the Dutch Colony of Curacao did not require an entry visa, so they stamped the Jewish travel documents with their “no visa required” and a transit visa through Japan. (Maybe that's what the American-Japanese who were interned during the war should have done.) Most were trained to Vladivostok and shipped to Osaka and some other Japanese cities. There were perhaps as many as 10,000 Jews escaped this way. Later, many were shipped to Shanghai after the Japanese conquered it, joining, not always amicably, a community of Russian Jews who settled in that city after escaping the Bolsheviks in 1917.

Not much came of the objectives of the Fugu Plan, many of the refuges were poor, and many not well-educated. In any case, the Japanese decided to attack Pearl Harbor, and the rest, as they say, “is history.” But it might have been very different history (rather than a movie, which nobody would have believed). Those intrepid Nazis even sent a representative to Japan to try to get the Japanese to kill the Jews for them, but nothing came of that (perhaps they Japanese Army was too busy exterminating 300,000 Chinese in the Rape of Nanking).

It is said that war is just an extension of politics, and politics makes strange “bedfellows.” It would be hard to find a stranger story than this one.*

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*But see No. 33.5 for a candidate.

34. 2: KINGDOM OF HEAVEN(?) 7.25.2006

It is difficult to comment upon the latest Ridley Scott film, Kingdom of Heaven , without drifting off into what it implies about faith and religion and how it resonates with the current escalating war of Yaweh and Allah's battles over the kingdom of Middle East earth. The film didn't do all that well at the box-office, maybe because the Crusades are rather an obscure history to Americans, or because Orlando Bloom (Balian), who is cast as the moral male lead does not seem larger that the broadsword he has to wield. But you have to like a guy who rams a red-hot sword into the guts of a priest who has just had Balian's wife beheaded before her burial because she supposedly was a suicide. Up to that point Balian is just a humble blacksmith (with rather skinny arms). As it happens, Balian's father, crusader knight Sir Godfrey, arrives and invites him to Jerusalem, where the son becomes heir to his father's estate and army and an almost invincible knight.

The almost courtly dialogue seems apt to the period, although it will likely put off viewers weened on F-word variations. But what seems to make this movie work is Scott's attention to detail in location, set design, and the sheer historical period “feel” of the production design of the picture. Having spent a little time in North Africa and the Middle East what “nailed” it for me was the light . If you have ever looked at the watercolors of Napoleon's artists from his Egyptian campaign, or paintings of Jerusalem, you can't help but notice the creamy, almost café au lait light (even though it was shot in Spain and Morocco). It's different than the illumination we get in temperate climes and different from that the klieg-sh back-lit glare of many a Speilberg film. And when somebody is in a room with a candle the only light you get is confined to its penumbra. Paradoxically, it is the attention to light we used to see in good black and white films. The light “puts you there”; that's worth the price of admission for me.

But there's more than light to Scott's movies. Another appealing aspect of his films that I have come to see as his “theme” is the calling upon of flawed (even if slightly) men (and women) to confront large issues and historical circumstances. There is Maximus, the Gladiator , a guy who would prefer to farm in Spain rather than slice and dice his buddies in the arena; there was Dekkhard, the reluctant Blade Runner , who would press his investigations of replicants right up t the point of wondering if he was one as well; or Ripley, the Alien fighter in the tight tank top who ends up having a curious relationship with them; even Thelma and Louise battling getting groped and played for dopes and choosing “death victory” over the certainties of male justice. Balian seems the least flawed (other than physical stature). Save for the guilt he feels for exterminating that slimy prelate he seems refreshingly secular, and more concerned with protecting those who need protection (a knightly code) than with the acquisition of power and slaying of infidels of the crusaders.

These are big themes, seeming to require equally-sized movies. They seem to deal a lot with invasion – Goths, Replicants, Aliens, uppity Women, and Muslims in the Holy Land – and heroes and heroines called upon to overcome their human failings to “do the right thing.” I think that Scott did the right thing to release Kingdom of Heaven into a post-911 world; it's a view, although not always accurate (but then noting is accurate where faith is concerned), into the soul of people who can say with such conviction that “God wills it.” A perspective through which we might see the deep, deadly roots of the current malaise, in which the oft misspoken use of the word “crusade” by G.W. Bush seems to speak a truth we don't want to consider.

Yet this movie might not have done all that well at the box office because there is a lot in it that will send Christians back for another play of The Passion of the Christ. The Crusades were a dirty, brutal, acquisitive, recreation and diversion of Dark Age Europe, a way of sending off the poor, stupid, and credulous, to die of disease and the sword and with the illusion of having earned eternal salvation for killing what infidels they could before expiring themselves. Christian history wrapped it in much fable, not the least of which was Richard “the Lion Hearted,” England's never-there “king” who Robin Hood pined for, but was a sadistic bastard who had thousands of the residents of Acre beheaded outside it walls. There was brutality on both sides, as there is today, because Inshallah is as powerful a justification for it as “God Wills It.”

That brings up the third aspect I like in Ridley Scott films—the guy knows how to do war, at least the way armies used to do war. The siege scenes by the armies of Saladin have the same incendiary “artillery” barrages and brutal mano a mano combat that we remember from the opening scenes of Gladiator . The hegemony of Jerusalem has changed many times, as churches have become mosques and then back again, as the cross and the crescent have exchanged places atop its walls. In this account, Balian sues for peace and surrenders Jerusalem, to withdraw from the Holyland (the Knights Templar had already left to take their place in The Da Vinci Code ). Since then, Jerusalem has returned to Israeli hegemony, but one wonders if there is another chapter to the saga of The Kingdom of Heaven . Jerusalem—“house of peace”; will it ever be thus.

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34. 1: PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN? 7.12.2006

I had to get a new passport this year. The old one, with the extra pages, filled with stamps and visas that signify many wonderful memories was due to expire. The new one, my fifth passport with the seal of the good ole USA on the front, has a photo that perhaps confirms Erma Bombeck's old dictum that it's time to go home when you start to look like your passport photo. My new passport also reminded me that over the years I have always been proud (admittedly in varying degrees) to get out my passport in the documents control lines of different countries. That was then; this, as they say, is now.

When the immigration officer at Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok Airport opened my new passport and gave me that scrutinizing glance I had a twinge of embarrassment. It was not the photo—I no longer look like a terrorist they way I did, with my dark hair and beard and swarthy looks, in my early passports—it was that I was from what is now one of the most despised countries in the world. Most people are able to make a distinction between the citizens of a country and its government; but I prefer that they don't have to make that distinction with regard to my country. I prefer not feeling like the kid with the father who shows up drunk at his Little League game shouting obscenities at the players and picking fights with the coaches.

I don't know what that cold look by the immigration officer meant by that glance, but this time I knew what it could have meant .

Then there was the young Aussie couple that approached me in Pacific Coffee, where I feed my caffeine addiction and scribble in my notebooks. They had just arrived in Hong Kong for the first time and were having trouble navigating. After I assisted them they asked if I lived in Hong Kong. I fudged. I said “yes.” Technically, I am; I'm here for a month in a flat, not a hotel, I shop and cook, and I am not a tourist. I avoided saying that word that now catches in my throat—American. This is worse than that one trip, back in the Reagan years, when I put Canadian flag stickers on my luggage. Much worse.

Guns.

I wonder, when people see my passport photo if they superimpose the snarling, deceitful faces of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, the liars and cronies of war profiteers, whose unjust, foolish and failed war has brought us so low in the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. I wonder if my passport evokes images for them of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, the Guantanamo gulag, the unnumbered bodies of innocent men women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder if they have forgotten, or had blotted out by America's arrogant, preemptive war, the sympathy they felt for us over 9-11. I wonder when they see my passport if those with long enough memories remember the sacrifices American armed forces made in the World Wars. Or, do they think that we have gone from making the world safe for democracy to make the world America's petrol pump.

Guns and Bibles

And I wonder, when they look at my new passport, if they think “Christian,” maybe “Christian fundamentalist-evangelical.” The predominant religion of America has become an embarrassment, too, as its leaders have curried favor from sanctimonious blowhards who call down the wrath of God on anyone, or any nation, that does not fit their narrow-minded (and paradoxically un -Christian) cosmology. America's president has the hubris to publicly declare that his God has all but ordained him as the messiah of a new world order, as the gun-toting savior of the world from the scourges of Islam. Here in Hong Kong teams of America's white-shirted Mormon missionaries prowl the streets of the city and the New Territories looking for souls to snatch, who have no idea themselves that they, like most missionaries, are merely the pompous, prattling vanguard of economic imperialists.

Guns and Bibles and “Democracy”

The there is the pathetic irony of the Bush administrations trumpeting of democracy, democracy American-style, as the hope of the future. Does my passport evoke sneers at the hypocrisy of “democracy” as the public relations slogan for the enforcement of American satrapies, American client states, for pumping crude into American Hummers and SUVs? Do they laugh up their sleeves at the glorification of American democracy by a man, who, more than unable to define the word, is the product of a stolen election, who has perverted the political process for the gain of his friends and supporters, who has disclaimed to nearly every piece of legislation passed by Congress, who has initiated Patriot Acts that are oxymoronic, who countenances torture of prisoners, spying on his own people, and uses fear as the prime mechanism for both support and intimidation. All that's missing are those nifty Gestapo uniforms.

I used to be proud of my passport because we Americans were responsible for so much that benefited the world. Sure, we have always been out to make a buck, but we have advanced science, technology and medicine, led in education, promoted human rights. Even though we have been stingy in foreign aid we have been quick to come to the aid of those in distress. American NGOs have earned us many friends in may nations. Even putting aside all the usual hype and blather that we are “number 1” in this and that and “the greatest nation on the face of the earth” and the usual self-aggrandizement and promotion, we have been a leader and a beacon for those “yearning to breathe free.” Now, former immigrants and their progeny are being told that every immigrant might be a terrorist or a drug mule.

Now, much of America's good reputation has been smeared, much good will has been squandered because an unenlightened, self-interested, arrogant leadership have paradoxically become accomplices of they very forces they claim as our enemies. They have seen the political advantage of the fear that Al Qaeda has sown in 9-11; they have seized that fear and evoked it like a bogeyman on a terrorized electorate that needs to be kept terrorized . They have created an idolatry for a president who scorns depthful analysis, punishes those who dare to go off message, finds scapegoats for his failures, takes the quick decision and “stays the course” at any cost. Rather that inquire honestly and earnestly into America's role in the world, past, present and future, it has adopted a brutish, clumsy, bullying posture of preemptive aggression and “nation [re]building.” They have not looked for motivation for heinous acts against us beyond the whiney refrain of “Why do they hate us, we're so wonderful.” Is it any wonder the world was “shocked and awed”—they have seen a great nation betray itself.

Is it any wonder, then, that I am so tentative and guarded when I have to tender my new passport. I feel like saying, “Don't blame me, please, I'm the guy in that old passport, the American you used to smile at, give a thumbs up and say ‘America, Cleen -tone, America, Cleen -tone'.” Those were the good old days. No wonder the guy in my old passport picture looks happier.

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