John reviewed the movie PI in
Spring 2000
I was born on August10th, 1974, in the USA. That was the day on which Richard
Nixon resigned from the presidency, and, some think, took the office’s
dignity with him. Tapes full of anti-Semitic remarks and anti-Communist plans
were hastily being hidden and destroyed: lies were being told, deceptions orchestrated.
At high noon, Nixon’s resignation took effect and two hours later, finally
confident that I would not be born into his scandalous administration, I broke
the amniotic Watergate and was pushed into the world. A little later, President
Ford was stumbling through public events and falling down stairs while I was
taking my first steps and taking a few tumbles of my own. At least I had an
excuse. Reagan, B-movie cowboy, took office when I was six and still wearing
my cowboy hat and wielding plastic six shooters. Reagan was proud of this symbol
of reckless American imperialism that translated into a campaign of genocide
against thousands upon thousands of Amerindians. It was one hundred and fifty
years ago that the train of progress cut across America and the cowboys slaughtered
the buffalo from its windows.
A six year old’s adherence or romanticizing of the shameful events of the past does not account for America’s racist imperialism. Just as our parents gave us that virtuous Lone Ranger and hobby horses, there is little doubt that my generation will give their children light sabers and Star Wars movies. Star Wars is really a story about cowboys and samurai fighting in space: East meets West.
And speaking of the East, it wasn’t long ago that a downed plane caused the Great Wall to become the Iron Curtain. Behind it are pollution free bicycles and very cheap labor. Nixon is credited with re-establishing diplomatic relations with China. Reagan did his part, too. Now the United States’ effort to coax China’s support and cooperation in this current war comes off as a vague threat.
Reagan did his part to establish diplomacy with China, too. Domestically, Reagan’s trickle-down made me miss Carter and his strongly ethical domestic and foreign policies. Carter, the honest peanut farmer, ever the peacemaker, lost his office to the number on the gasoline pump. Myself, born into a family onto whom the wealth was trickled, I never had the amenities of some of my upper class friends. Nonetheless we had two cars, a house, and I went on to a rather nice college. Wealth or not, those of us in the lower classes still contribute to the scandalous life of excess: workplace massacres, obesity,strip mining, deforestation and disposable everything. And while consumption increases, the dollar decreases. ‘Inflation,’ people say with that typically smug American voice of authority, recalling the television reporter and politician. Inflation should really be called ‘spontaneous consumption,’ It is a five-finger discount taken by the invisible hand of capitalism that really accounts for the dramatic devaluation of our in God we trusts. There was famine on the earth. Some ungodly shortage of Ethiopian grain and the nation was starving. Grain, the cabbage patch doll shortage, and of course the occasional Middle East oil shortage. All of it disappears, consumed like guns and butter, supply and demand.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Somewhere a smoke detector went off. Martha Stewart and I went on talking.
She said that the explosion of sexuality and crime in the political scene signaled a similar disturbance in the American people. I argued that her that her insistence of making the former a sign of the latter was arbitrary and not indicative of a cause and effect relationship. All these words: freedom, family values, corruption, are only words and don’t really mean anything. Not anymore.
She called me a deconstructionist.
Martha went on talking about ’Cigar-gate,’ saying how it was a sign of America’s decline, and that the media’s sponsorship of sensationalism, lewdness and violence would lead to the decline of the family and American itself. “And what about Clinton, what should we do with him?” she asked, and I replied, “Lock him in a closet with a box of cigars and make him smoke them until he turns green.”
And Monica . . . ?
The American way: It means freedom, truth and justice. It means sex scandals, conspiracies and decadent consumption.
In summer of 2001 I moved to South Manhattan to attend graduate school. The week I arrived a skydiver flung him self from an airplane and, missing his mark, ended up dangling from Lady Liberty’s torch. He was rescued and then promptly arrested. Extreme stunts are a new kind of American adventure, I thought, which like all adventures, come close to liberty’s flame without getting burned. Two weeks later the World Trade Center fell to the ground. A cloud of dust rapidly overtook the neighborhood. I awoke that morning to the sound of the telephone. The person on the other side was saying, “Are you all right?” Everywhere in Manhattan phones were resounding with this same message. Unanswered telephones rang like funeral bells.
That day there was a knock on the door. A young black man, a budding politician, stood on the other side of it. His name was Ahmad Johnson, a name that he was quick to point out means ‘the son of John.’ Some people insist it means ‘the property of a slave-holder.’ That date, 9/11, was his birthday. Everyone in the apartment wished him an ironic happy birthday and for a moment the chaos stopped, and then it resumed. We tuned into NPR and listened for news, news that might mean life or death.
The axis of evil: it runs right from oil producers to communists, from Muslim nations, the world’s fastest growing religion, to the communist north of Korea, adamantly anti-religious. During the 1980s no one could recall, when brought before Congress, what linked the communists to the Muslim Iranians during the Iran-Contra affair, but it was evident that the United States was right in the middle of it. The communist philosophy predicts the toppling of the machinery of capitalism, while the Middle East produces the oil that runs that machinery.
Now there is talk of demonizing the enemy. If war is not demons and angels, then what? Cowboys and Indians again? Or is it white hats and black hats, good guys and bad guys, and both of them hate the reds? I can see George W. in a ten-gallon hat, soaked in 20 million gallons of oil, but guarding our values. But demons, that is another story. On the day of the attacks, the inhabitants of South Manhattan were eliciting the words ‘nuclear winter and apocalypse’ to describe their streets. War against demons puts us firmly in the territory of the latter. All over the world there are Jews fighting Muslims, Muslims fighting Hindus, Muslims fighting Muslims and George W. Bush stupidly calling his campaigns a Crusade, referring to the Christian aristocrats’ war of pillage on the Muslims. Ancient art depicts demons as having snake bodies or pointed ears, horns and hooves and deep gravely voices. It seems that in our modern times a hooked nose and a turban will do. A’demonized’ enemy is another way of saying that bigotry has become the driving force for war. We know the outcome of this, we have tried to prevent it, to prevent the train of progress from becoming a death train once again.
The government, of course, insists that 9/11 was an attack on American values. Others insist it was an attack on American money, an opinion supported by Mayor Guliani’s quick and patriotic response: Americans start your spending. Some say this was an attack on Judaism and are steadfast in their opinion. America and Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, Israel and Palestine, Bosnia and Croatia: the religious and economic wars rage on. George W. Bush’s continuation of the oil war of the 1990s -- his father’s unfortunate legacy -- may stretch again between oil and communism. Not coincidentally George W. Bush is a former oil baron, the fox guarding the hen house, and the henhouse is starting to look an awful lot like Alaska.