MOVIES 63 Capitalism as Drama

July 20, 2009

Somehow the movie Wall Street (1987) still holds up after all these years. Sure, the technology is dated—the cell phones are hilariously huge and the fat-back screens in offices display only green digits—but it hardly matters. The clothing by Alan Flusser is of course amazing and holds up too, but the real merit here runs deeper than appearances alone.

The sensibility of the film, the thrill of commerce and trade, the challenge of the battle between money and morality, and the larger-than-life quality of its main character—the rich, savvy, and unstoppable Gordon Gekko—all combine to make a legendary story that remains strangely inspiring in ways that its maker, Oliver Stone, surely did not entirely intend.

The film ends with a paean to labor unions and governments that save companies from rapacious capitalists, but it seems artificial, like a Victorian novel that had to have a happy ending lest the readers revolt. The overall message concerns the central role of finance and commerce in moving history forward. Even the famed “greed is good” speech gives one pause: he is onto something here, even if it is inelegantly stated.

In the same way that the Godfather movies shaped the culture of organized crime, Wall Street continues to influence the way traders and high-flying capitalists understand themselves.

And it’s no wonder. The impression one is left with is all about the courage, the thrill of the fight, the riskiness of entrepreneurship, that struggle to obtain vast wealth, and the striving for the status of “master of the universe.” It pictures commerce as a gladiator fight, a magnificent and relentless struggle for progress, an epic and massively important setting in which the fate of civilization is determined.

Enticing isn’t it? Indeed it is and should be. Not all of commercial life is like this but parts of it are. And some features are universals that don’t just apply to high finance. Everywhere and always, the future is uncertain. Those who make good judgments are rewarded. It isn’t easy. It isn’t for the faint of heart. Competition can be as fierce in a small business setting as in a big business one. Even the tiniest shop faces a daily risk, and this risk affects decision-making in every area. Contrary to what Gekko claims, there is no sure thing, even with inside knowledge and even with all the wealth of the world. Indeed, Gekko is ultimately undone by forgetting that there might be someone out there with even better information.

The thing that levels the playing field in this rivalry in the service of society is the ubiquitous reality that no one really knows for sure what is around the corner. And in the end, whether you win or lose depends on that fickle and uncontrollable thing called consumer volition and its confrontation with the other undeniable reality of scarcity in all things.

I was trying to think of another story that captures that amazing element of drama associated with commercial life. It was this feature of the novels of Ayn Rand that most impressed Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. She gave voice to their own love of economics as high-drama intellectual battles for and against the progress of man.

My own favorite writer in this genre is Garet Garrett, with his four novels written in the 1920s.

It is not just his novels. It is Garrett’s entire worldview. He saw the market as the tableau for the working out of the great struggles in human history. Unlike Oliver Stone, he favored capitalism, for the reason that it was the engine of progress, and a vibrant and wholly cooperative way to work out the competitive spirit in the human person.

The virtues of steadfastness, valor, bravery, and the impulse to make a dent in the universe, and never, never, never give in (Churchill) are tragically associated with the death and destruction of war, but free enterprise provides a means by which these impulses can be channeled toward creative purposes.

And so, for example, in The Cinder Buggy we are witness to a titanic struggle within a family over whether the future belongs to iron or steel. And the description of the struggle in the lives of its entrepreneurs causes the heart to race.

The day of steel was breaking.

It was not a brilliant event. It was like a cloudy dawn, unable to make a clean stroke between the light and the dark. Yet everyone had a sense of what was passing in this dimness.

Gib, whose disbelief in steel rested as much upon pain memories and hatred as upon reason, was a fanatic; but at the same time great numbers of men with no such romantic bias of mind were violently excited on one side or the other of a fighting dispute. Fate decided the issue. The consequences were such as become fate. They were tremendous, uncontrollable, unimaginable. They changed the face of civilization. Vertical cities, suburbs, subways, industrialism, the rise of a wilderness in two generations to be the paramount nation in the world, victory in the World War,—those were consequences.

And look at this. You have to love this material:

And all the time, bad as it was, steel kept coming more and more into use, especially, that is to say,—almost exclusively in the form of rails. And the reason the steel rail kept coming into use was that an amazing human society yet unborn, one that should have shapes, aspects, wants, powers and pastimes then undreamed of, was calling for it,—calling especially for the steel rail.

The steel men heard it. That was what kept them in hope. The iron men heard it and were struck with fear.

Even the everyday actions of workers become fascinating:

The air was torn, shattered, upheaved, compressed, pierced through, by sounds of shock, strain, impact, clangor, cannonade and shrill whistle blasts, occurring in any order of sequence, and then all at one time dissolving in a moment of vast silence even more amazing to the ear. Conversation would be possible only by shrieks close up. The men seemed never to speak at their work. They did not communicate ideas by signs either. Each man had his place, his part, his own pattern of action, and did what he did with a kind of mechanical inevitability, as if it were something he had never learned. They were related not to each other but to the process, kept their eyes fixedly on it for obvious reasons, and stepped warily. A false gesture might have immediate consequences.

Later in the book, the fight between the dynasties revolves around price movements. One side gets into the nail business. The other side dumps nails on the market to lower the price, attempting to drive all competition out of business, even though it proves harmful to the very firm doing the dumping. The action is driven by spite, and the capitalist deems the price paid worth it for his goal of revenge. The action starts his downward spiral toward death. The firm that hopes to make and sell nails moves on to greater things.

So it is in the real world of commerce. No, the profitability is not always the motivation. Self-interest defines a wide category of human impulses, from benevolence to greed to the desire to destroy. This multiplicity of motivation can no more be ended than human nature itself can be permanently changed. The beauty of the market is its capacity for funneling it all in the service of the consumers, and The Cinder Buggy shows how all this works. Who benefitted from the struggle? Those who needed nails and were glad to pay a lower price.

Price movements are also central to the drama of Satan’s Bushel. The reader follows the price of wheat up and down and up again, and watches these price changes shift the fortunes of families, communities, and whole regions. No matter how powerful and rich the players, they are reduced to bit players in the face of larger market trends.

Garrett writes of a wheat speculator what could be said of Gekko in his best moments:

No rule of probability contains him. To say that he acts upon impulse, without reflection, in a headlong manner, is true only so far as it goes. Many people have that weakness. With him it is not a weakness. It is a principle of conduct. The impulse in his case is not ungovernable. It does not possess him and overthrow his judgment. It is the other way around. He takes possession of the impulse, mounting it as it were the enchanted steed of the Arabian Nights, and rides it to its kingdom of consequences. What lies at the end is always a surprise; if it is something he doesn’t care for, no matter. Another steed is waiting. Meaning to do this, living for it, he has no baggage. There is nothing behind him. If he has wealth it is portable. He is at any moment ready.

It is the same with The Driver and with Harangue: the wonders of market-based inevitabilities sweep all dreams before them. Whether that dream is for some whacko socialist utopia, a Manichean experiment in living off the raw products of nature, or the goal of reigning in market forces through regulation in order to benefit a few at the expense of the many, the market’s love of reality is triumphant. Those who know this in advance are the long-run winners.

In the movie Wall Street, we are told that we should all love unions and their desire to keep wages as high as possible and fix jobs in place for generation after generation. And yet look around and see: the unions have destroyed the American car companies and they have put a serious dent in the profitability of airlines too. Their wishes are unsustainable because they are not the market’s command.

In the end, who is the real destroyer: Gordon Gekko or the unions he fought? The movie ends with the unions and the government on top. History ends with the capitalists on top.

64

The Film Noir Moment

September 21, 2009

Film noir is not riding any wave of popularity, so it is the perfect time to anticipate a trend. These movies from the 1940s are not only brilliant and beautiful but also entertaining in their own right. They look completely different to us now from what they must have looked like then, and I don’t mean merely to inspire a sentimentalism for days gone by.

These were times when Mises’s was writing Human Action in English, Hazlitt was working at the New York Times, and Ayn Rand was marketing The Fountainhead to Hollywood. These authors, writing on manual typewriters and submitting the results only in hard copy, were the champions of markets and technological progress. They saw what others did not, namely, that the innovations of the time, as wonderful as they seemed, were only the beginning of what was possible under freedom.

The film noir of their period beautifully illustrates the strange way in which the operation of society itself was limited by the existing technology as compared with our own digital age. Because none of us can live two lifetimes, we depend on media like this to provide us insight in this area and many others.

The plots of many of these hundreds of films turn on the ability of people to change identities and get lost in the thick of things, with tricks and turns that would be completely unimaginable today in the information age. What is especially interesting is that the characters in the movies are unaware that they are living in what seems like prehistoric times to us. For them, the ability to call house-to-house, to listen to the radio in the car, to communicate with others from phone booths might have been dazzling.

Watching today, we see a society radically hobbled by the limits of technology, people whose decisions and course of life is determined by this fact, even without their knowing it. The biggest limit concerns the absence of information about people’s backgrounds and hence core character. Evildoers masquerade as respectable people, while respectable people turn to evil and are oddly successful at hiding it even from intimates.

The Detour, for example, is about a hitchhiker—talk about an anachronism!—picked up by a driver who hasn’t contacted his parents in many years; nor do they have a way to contact him. The driver unexpectedly dies and the hitchhiker, fearing blame, dumps his body, takes his money and clothes, and assumes a new identity. He even plans to sell the car, since there was some disconnect between the owner and the car registration. Then a girl he picks up turns to him and demands to know where the body is, a terrifying moment simply because one person knows something that was previously hidden. The lack of communication and knowledge is the core plot device, so that information is the source of terror.

There are other features of this film that turn on technological limits. Many people seem strangely displaced, without a known past, and they can float around from place to place with anonymity, appearing and disappearing from the social fabric. The newspapers were the way you heard the news, but gossip was generally more reliable. You had to be standing right by the phone to get a call. The phones were necessarily connected to the wall, so if you wanted to make a private call, you had to grab the phone and take it into another room. In Detour, when one person pulls on the cord to get the phone back, he inadvertently strangles a girl in the next room.

Not even credit checks are very efficient, which is why the lead in Quicksand was able to buy a watch on a borrowed $100 and resell it for $30 a little while later, so that he could return the $20 that he borrowed from the cash register at work, which no one would have noticed was gone until the weekly accountancy check. By the way, in this particular film, his misdeed is discovered, and he has to return the $100 the next day, which requires that he mug a drunk, which then leads to being blackmailed for $500 by someone who saw him do it, and so on until he is on the run for auto theft and murder. It’s like a metaphor for financing the U.S. government.

Sometimes the information asymmetry is extreme, as in Double Indemnity. An insurance investigator is checking into an exorbitant insurance claim with a partner who in fact is the perpetrator of the very crime he is investigating. The insurance man is romantically pursuing a woman, who he does not know plans to kill him once the scheme is complete. She is, in turn, married to a man who doesn’t know that his current wife is the killer of his previous wife. And the daughter of the woman befriends the insurance man without knowing that he is the killer of her father. Meanwhile, the daughter’s boyfriend doesn’t know that her stepmother is lying to him and probably setting him up to take the fall for this grisly mess.

In The Man Who Cheated Himself, the entire plot turns on a confusion about whether the car that dumped a body at the airport is blue or green, a problem that would have been solved with a color camera at the scene of the crime.

In a personal favorite of mine, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, the details of a murder some 20 years ago had been forgotten so that a stranger in town has to go to the deepest archives of the local newspaper to discover that the heiress who runs the local industry conspired with her now-district-attorney husband to frame up an innocent man, who went to the chair for a crime he didn’t commit. This plot wouldn’t have gone anywhere in an age of Google.

Nor would the scenario of The Scar, in which a gangster assumes the identity of a psychoanalyst by murdering him following a casino robbery gone bad, be plausible in the slightest today. Our faces are on the tiniest piece of our identities, and they count for very little as compared with our digital data trail. Nor would the crook be surprised to find that the seemingly respectable psychoanalyst whose identity he assumed was in even deeper trouble with the law than he was.

The naive bride in Dangerous Crossing would not have inadvertently married a man who planned to murder her to steal her fortune, which he believes should have been inherited by her father’s brother. Nor would she have lost track of him on the cruise ship they boarded together on their honeymoon. And surely the doctor examining the sick passenger would have quickly figured out that this was the same man who was missing!

There is a series of strange apartment break-ins in I Wake Up Screaming. Several times, the plot turns on the uncanny way in which people can easily break locks on doors and windows. Not infrequently, people wake in the middle of the night to find someone standing over them asking questions. The absence of reliable alarm systems and secure locks gives the film a strange quality: everyone is vulnerable; no one is safe from prying eyes, whether they are doing good or evil.

So on the one hand, the level of privacy is far beyond what we imagine is possible today. Who today can disappear, sneak away, be out of touch for any length of time, much less change identities or travel anonymously? On the other hand, there is no security against physical invasion of one’s home, car, office, or personal records, none of which are password-protected and all of which exist only in the physical world. As much as people bemoan the absence of privacy today, the current inversion of the film-noir world is far to be preferred.

The ability to disappear and inability to be secure fosters the world of relentless suspicion and danger that is inherent in the film noir genre. Women fall into two general categories: black widows whose secret pasts lie in hiding as they pursue their next victim in a nefarious plot, or fallen angels who pine for stability and get hooked up with bad men before being rescued from a life of desperation. Surely we have here a reflection of the deep anxieties of women in a time when men were being snatched away by the draft and sent away to foreign lands to kill and be killed.

In many plots, a moral ambiguity is pervasive, as one small and regrettable decision turns out to have disproportionately bad results, which then require an attempt at coverup that involves the further suppression of conscience and a further trip down the road to ruin. The viewer is never entirely sure when to stop sympathizing with the evildoer, who often seems to have bad choices imposed on him because of the imperfections of the world around him. The small steps towards dishonesty don’t trouble us until we find ourselves traveling with him to perdition.

What’s more, many of the small steps toward wrongdoing have a rationale rooted in a distrust of the justice system. The judge will never believe me if I say that I didn’t commit this murder, so I’d better make a break for it! The police will throw me in the slammer for decades for this petty theft so I’d better cover it up! and on it goes: no one quite believes that the state’s system of justice really works fairly and accurately. Despite the censor’s attempts to bolster civic mythology in the final scenes of such movies, a deep distrust of all official institutions is their political infrastructure.

And this fact is very striking given the portrayal of police and police investigators in the film, who don’t seem to be entirely on the other side of the divide from mere civilians in film noir. They are not jackbooted or heavily armed or otherwise tasing people for showing the slightest bit of resistance. They seem like people with different jobs to do, and that’s about it.

And they always have time, as when the poisoned man in D.O.A. comes stumbling into the investigations bureau and says, “I’m here to report a murder. Mine.” He then takes a couple of hours out of the time of five officers to explain how he ended up being poisoned by a dangerous gang of racketeers.

It can sometimes be hilarious to our generation when the criminals are trying to head for the border, where presumably the law then cannot reach them. We know nothing of this strange assumption today.

Even if individual policemen themselves are decent and conscientious, these films are replete with cynicism toward law—toward the system, with lies leading to more lies and deceptions and coverups in all aspects of life. They were made in the 1940s, in a time we are all taught was defined by the great struggle between obvious good and obvious evil, embodied in the “greatest generation,” which fought the “good war.” How could these themes of deeply complicated moral ambiguity and official corruption really connect with audiences?

Well, reading Jeff Riggenbach’s Why American History Is Not What They Say provides a richer picture of a time when people did not, in fact, trust government.

It was widely believed (or understood) that there was something fishy about that whole Pearl Harbor thing and the drive to war, widely believed that officials in Washington were just improvising during the Depression, widely believed that the expansion of the state and its vast new powers were not really about science but were rather a power grab.

In fact, one looks in vain for evidence from film noir that any viewers were predisposed to believe anything from on high.

In other words, there was a veneer of naiveté but growing distrust beneath the surface—times, in other words, very much like our own. It is in the writings of Mises, Hazlitt, and Rand that we discover the secrets to understanding the strange world of film noir. It is a feast for the eyes and ears, a look at how dramatically and sweepingly different our times are in so many ways, and yet how the themes of corruption, deception, and lies are persistent wherever public and private violence against person and property rears its ugly head.

65

Who Was Beowulf?

November 22, 2007

It took twice through, but I’m finally convinced; Beowulf is a wonderful film. There would be plenty to recommend it, even if it had stuck to the original plot line.

Nearly every frame is beautiful and riveting. The visuals seemed to have borrowed from the field of gaming, so you can never quite tell if what you are looking at is real or animated. The music is a kick. Beowulf is himself thrilling to watch, as are the monsters, dragons, swords, and, above all, the time: it is set in the 10th century Scandinavia. The viewer is convinced that it must have been something like this.

Having read the newest translation several years ago, by Seamus Heaney, I was not prepared for how the film would change the plot, which is rather linear and boring in the original, but, hey, it’s the 10th century, so who can complain? A monster vexes a town. Beowulf arrives and kills it, kills the monster’s mother, and becomes king and then does other amazing things before he dies a hero’s death.

In the new film version, there is a remarkable undercurrent. Hrothgar, the king that comes before, has a hidden secret and it concerns the monster’s mother. It seems that Grendel is Hrothgar’s offspring, and the witch, played by Angelina Jolie, is irresistible to him, and, later, to Beowulf. Beowulf kills Grendel and then sets out for the mother, who seduces him into giving her yet another offspring that returns to torment the community many years later. Beowulf lies, however. He has given in to her, but tells everyone that he killed her.

His secret is known only to a few: his wife and his closest associate. Both decide not to pass it on. He is a hero and generations will sing his praises. So declare the court historians, and so it was to be, in the official version. And so the official version has stood.

There is a profoundly moral story here, much like Faustus. What we see are the dreadful consequences of sin visiting themselves on many more than just the sinner. The family is destroyed. The community is destroyed. The path of history is distorted from its rightful journey toward justice and truth onto another path of betrayal, hurt, suffering, violence, degradation, and ruin.

The moral can be described as Christian, and rigorously so. Indeed, there is an overtly Christian theme in the movie. In an early scene, the king is asked whether the people should pray to the new Roman God named Jesus Christ. No, he says, they don’t need Jesus; they need a hero. Later in the film, the man who asked the question carries a crucifix, and, even later, becomes a Christian monk, working to convert the community, and successfully so. (Why the Christian Right isn’t heralding this movie is unclear.)

Is this just another case of hero-debunking in an age of cynicism, in which authentic virtue is a myth and there is no one to admire? I don’t think so. What’s at stake here is the reputation of leaders, who are a special breed. The state organizes itself in order to celebrate itself. It rules with the consensus of society, which also desires to celebrate the state and its leaders. The head of state has to work very hard not to emerge from this conspiracy as a hero.

We don’t have to look far for examples. See Mount Rushmore. Are we really suppose to believe the maniac, power-mad Theodore Roosevelt is godlike? And let’s consider people who in private life would be considered gangsters, thieves, liars, and murderers, men such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. How is it that they came to have their images on our nation’s money, that their glorious stories are taught to all American schoolkids? That their lives are held up to us as models of virtue and glory?

The underside of government leadership is the primary subject of all revisionist history, and this form of history is something we should always give some benefit of the doubt. It is the official story of the heroism of leadership that we should suspect. This is true even with such untarnished demigods as George Washington, who, by all revisionist accounts, was an incompetent general, a man who had no sympathy for the original American idea, who jumped at the chance to send in the troops to put down a tax rebellion. The father of our country? Come on.

Have you visited the Lincoln Memorial? Pure paganism, wrapped in state worship. There he sits in the Temple of Democracy, with his hands on the fasces, ruling us from the Heavens to which he clearly ascended after his martydom—the glorification of power on display for all of us. The tourists come and the tourists go. They figure that Lincoln must have been pretty marvelous, and think nothing more about it.

So it might have been—must have been—with Beowulf, the great warrior who became the king. We know and do not question the version of history handed down to us. We take his ancient hagiographers at their word. But what was the truth? The film provides a credible alternative history, but whether or not this is the true story, the message is one we need to hear: power corrupts. If we care about truth, we need to look at this corruption in its face, and learn from it, and not merely believe what the court historians, from our time or the 10th century, have told us.

66

Spidey’s Forgotten World

May 15, 2007

An unexpected pleasure of watching any Spider-Man movie—and the new release of the third is no exception—is that it allows the viewer to be a voyeur of a largely abandoned ideology, the perspective of the Old, Old Left. The film, and the ideological structure of Spiderman’s world, not only shows us how wrong the Left was way back then; it reveals just how much the class-conflict view of economics has had to adjust in order to stay viable at all.

In this Old-Left view of the social order, the essential conflict driving history was between the wealthy capitalistic barons who live in unrestrained opulence at the expense of the working poor, and the members of the working class who never get a break and never advance socially or economically.

In this unreconstructed version of leftism—which reached its height from the thirties through the sixties—issues like the environment, disability, sexual orientation, and the unmitigated evil of the European mind play no role at all. This was the Left of yesteryear that believed in socialism as a tool for economic development, the remedy for the intractable plight of the working poor. This is a view that has a dwindling presence in the world today.

Spider-Man is, of course, the archetype of the oppressed proletarian. He has all the makings of someone who should excell. He is smart, hard working, charming, and, by the way, possessed of amazing powers to climb buildings and dash around on webs. But he does not get justice: he still lives in a dingy, dumpy, broken-down apartment and can barely pay his rent. Whatever job he happens to find, he loses rather quickly. Bosses are arbitrary and uncaring. He takes great photos but has to sell them to J. Jonah Jameson at a fraction of what they are really worth, and hence the media mogul enjoys the surplus value. Part of his passion for social justice stems from his own consciousness of his economic class. Thus says the Socialist Worker: “Spider-Man is a superhero we can all identify with.”

Why he has to remain poor is not explained very well. He complains that the door on his apartment doesn’t work right, but he doesn’t think to hop over to Home Depot and pick up a new knob. The paint in his apartment is cracking and dingy but he somehow can’t take a Sunday afternoon off to do some renovation work, and neither can his proletarian landlord across the hall. He has to use a payphone to make calls when he could just Skype (actually, it is rather interesting: I can’t recall any computers in the film at all). He keeps selling his photos at below market rates, without thinking to offer them to a newspaper besides the Daily Bugle.

Get a life, Spidey! But for reasons that are unclear, he just can’t. Nor can those in his immediate circle. His girlfriend can’t get a break either. She lands a singing job on Broadway but (we saw it coming) she loses it rather quickly. Even though she is beautiful and talented, she ends up having to wait tables in a jazz club—an appropriate venue for her since jazz mavens can be counted on to embrace one of their own. Spidey’s aunt is in a similar situation, always on the verge of some economic disaster. None of this makes any sense unless you are willing to buy into the old socialist view that the capital owners are running everyone else into the ground via some kind of logic of history.

The third film in the series highlights the strange way in which Spider-Man’s villains are unusually sympathetic creatures. Look at the life of The Sandman as the movie presents it. He was a perfectly normal working-class guy but he was faced with the terrible reality of a daughter who was desperately in need of some medical attention that he couldn’t afford. So, he decided to steal the money—which, we are led to believe, is perfectly understandable. But during the robbery he became scared, and in an ill-fated moment of snap decision-making, he pulled the trigger on the guy he was robbing. The victim happened to be Spider-Man’s uncle, but once Spidey comes to understand the background here, he too is sympathetic.

The Sandman is caught and goes to jail, but then escapes. On the run from the police, he runs through a field and falls into a hole that is being used for some nuclear molecular-decompression blaster thing. His body and sand are fused together and he somehow lives on to continue his search for money to help his daughter. So while he is ostensibly Spider-Man’s enemy, they really share the crucial thing in common: class interest. The Sandman might steal, kill, and destroy without compunction but if you focus too much on these facts, you are blaming the victim!

The class interest issue arises again in connection with Harry Osborn (the New Goblin), the son of Norman Osborn, a.k.a. the Green Goblin, who is the ultimate Marxian prototype of the wealthy capitalist villain, who himself inherited wealth from his father Amberson Osborn. Here we have the capitalistic dynasty, which, despite living in a marbled-floored mansion, is rife with every pathology one can imagine, each brought on by the desperate struggle to retain possession of vast wealth. Harry is ostensibly friends with Peter Parker (Spider-Man) but is secretly involved in a private war to kill Spider-Man in revenge for Harry’s father’s death.

Tellingly, Spider-Man 3 has a period in which Harry and Peter are genuinely friends. In this period, Harry is sincere, charming, and truthful. How does this come about? Harry has lost his memory, enough such that his class consciousness is changed. His is temporarily freed from his attachment to wealth and class. Once he recovers his memory by looking at an image of his father, his nastiness comes back again.

And so on it goes. Not that any regular viewer would recognize any of the underlying ideological dynamics at work here. Nor is this presentation particularly effective, since the old-line Marxist notions are about as fantastical as the whole superhero concept itself. It posited that capitalism was driving the working poor into the ground; but as it turns out, capitalism is undeniably the best thing that ever happened to the working poor. In the sweep of history, capitalism has, in fact, been the sole source for economic advance. When this became obvious even to the Marxists at the turn of the 20th century, there ensued a clamor to reformulate the historical dynamic that Marx had dreamed up.

But what is most interesting here is how far removed the movie has to be from reality in order to project this Marxian vision. People are not quite responsible for their social positions but rather come to inhabit them in some sort of Rawlsian way, and they live out their appointed roles as if controlled by some hyper-historical force operating in the world.

In the movie, moreover, one sees none of the real institutions that truly do serve the working poor. Peter Parker is never shown shopping at Wal-Mart for example. Indeed, it is capitalism that has created in reality all that the socialists of old imagined their revolution would achieve: an unbelievable variety of food, clothing, and life-style luxuries at rock-bottom prices. So you might believe that the socialists would cheer. On the contrary, they loathe Wal-Mart more than any existing institution and implausibly claim that it is somehow an exploiter. The passage of time in the real world has also revealed the reality of what the working poor really want: not revolution against the capitalist class but more free ring tones on their cell phones.

It was only after it became perfectly obvious to every living person that the market was serving the poor that the socialist Left abandoned its goal of material prosperity of the working poor. Now they tell us that material prosperity itself is the problem (and actually Rothbard took note of this ideological turn in the late 1950s). If we want true justice, the new view went, we must all learn to live without. What should concern us is the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of cultural minorities, the hidden costs of industrialization, and even such bogeymen as warm weather.

What the Spider-Man movies show us is a simpler time when the socialists made a strong but empirically testable claim: socialism would serve proletarian interests whereas capitalism is always contrary to proletarian interests. That claim turned out to be 100% false. The movie makes one nostalgic for such simple-minded and easily refutable views. Perhaps it is appropriate that such a vision live on only in comic books and the movies based on them.

67

Neither Brown Nor Red

May 12, 2009

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, conservatives bitterly attacked the movie Reds when it came out in 1981. After all these years, the movie holds up as one of the most intellectually interesting and visually powerful portrayals of lost history that I’ve seen.

The movie stars Warren Beatty playing John Reed, the great communist journalist who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, a journalistic account of the Bolshevik revolution that whipped up a great deal of sympathy for the Bolsheviks in the United States. Diane Keaton plays his girlfriend and eventual wife, Louise Bryant.

The film is unforgettable in so many ways. It includes some of the best romantic fight scenes I’ve ever seen, not least because they paralleled the actual off-screen lives of Beatty and Keaton. The portrayals of legends like Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neill, and Emma Goldman are very convincing.

In terms of culture and politics, the film provides a richer education than you can get from 50 books on the topic of the Progressive Era, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the heady brew of interwoven cultural issues like women’s suffrage, birth control, abortion, free love, and the beginnings of the organized socialist movement in the United States.

The account of the many splits on the American Left in those days helps people understand why the history of the I.W.W. (Wobblies) is something that needs to be understood.

I’ve never been sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as versus the old regime in Russia, but the scenes here from the revolution are completely inspired and touch the heart of anyone who agrees with Jefferson on the positive need for revolution from time to time. The portrayals of both Lenin and Trotsky seem authentic, and thrillingly so.

That sense you get that you are watching the real thing is enhanced by the extended interviews with people who actually knew both Reed and Bryant. They all have strong opinions. They are wise. They are insightful. We hear from communists and anticommunists, socialites and politicians, working-class philosophers and credentialed academics. It is a beautiful mix.

From a political perspective, the film offers a devastating turnaround judgment on the results of revolution. Emma Goldman tries to talk some sense into Reed in the years following, and explains that millions have died from starvation, that nothing works right, that the vanguard of the proletariat has become a centralized police state. Reed won’t listen. He explains back to her that the socialist revolution requires terror, murder, and firing squads.

Here is the exchange (Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman):

Goldman:

Jack, we have to face it. The dream that we had is dying. If Bolshevism means the peasants taking the land, the workers taking the factories, then Russia’s one place where there is no Bolshevism.

Reed:

Ya know, I can argue with cops. I can fight with generals. I can’t deal with a bureaucrat.

Goldman:

You think Zinoviev is nothing worse than a bureaucrat. The soviets have no local autonomy. The central state has all the power. All the power is in the hands of a few men and they are destroying the revolution. They are destroying any hope of real communism in Russia. They are putting people like me in jail. My understanding of revolution is not a continual extermination of political dissenters. And I want no part of it. Every single newspaper has been shut down or taken over by the Party. Anyone even vaguely suspected of being a counter-revolutionary can be taken out and shot without a trial. Where does it end? Is any nightmare justifiable in the name of defense against counter-revolution? The dream may be dying in Russia, but I’m not. It may take some time, but I’m getting out.

Reed:

You sound like you are a little confused about the revolution in action, EG. Up ’till now you’ve only dealt with it in theory. What did you think this thing was going to be? A revolution by consensus where we all sat down and agreed over a cup of coffee?

Goldman:

Nothing works! Four million people died last year. Not from fighting war, they died from starvation and typhus in a militaristic police state that suppresses freedom and human rights—where nothing works!

Reed:

They died because of the French, British and American blockade that cut off all food and medical supplies. And, counter-revolutionaries have sabotaged the factories and the railroads and telephones. And the people, the poor, ignorant, superstitious, illiterate people are trying to run things themselves just like you always said they should, but they don’t know how to run them yet. Did you honestly think things were going to work right away? Did you honestly expect social transformation was going to be anything other than a murderous process? It’s a war EG, and we got to fight it like we fight a war: with discipline, with terror, with firing squads. Or we just give it up.

Goldman:

Those four million didn’t die fighting a war. They died from a system that cannot work.

Reed:

It’s just the beginning EG. It’s not happening like we thought it would. It’s not happening the way we wanted it to, but it is happening. If you walk out on it now, what does your whole life mean?

And here we come to understand something of the strange mind of the dedicated communist, so dogmatic in his adherence to a creed that nothing can shake the faith, not even the deaths of millions and millions of people. Reed’s doubts about the revolution and the Communist Party crystallize only when one of his speeches is edited. So he can turn a blind eye to holocaust but a violation of his freedom to speak becomes an intolerable act. Some moral compass!

At the same time, we are given a more complicated picture at the ground level of what drove the actual events of the Bolshevik Revolution. The film narrative focuses heavily on the Russian war on Germany and what the draft and massive death meant for the Russian people. It prepared them to embrace radical solutions. Lenin in particular was more hardcore than anyone else on the need to end the war. In real life, there was another complicating factor here: hyperinflation had wrecked the economy. Hopelessness is what drove the Russians into the hands of the communists.

Stateside, we discover that World War I, the gigantic military machine erected in the United States to fight it, the betrayal of the antiwar cause by Woodrow Wilson, and the emergence of a capitalist class working together with the state machinery were the issues that emboldened the socialist movement in the United States.

Let’s consider militarism, the draft, and the government-business partnership of war to be pieces of what we can call right-wing government. The film brilliantly portrays how the Right prepares the way for the Left—in both the United States and Russia. The Right gives the motivation and creates the sense of desperation and moral outrage that leads people to embrace utterly implausible solutions like socialism and communism.

Had there been no war and inflation in Russia, there would have been no revolution, and we would have been spared 80 years of communism. In the United States, the communists and socialists would have remained a small group of activists with no rallying cry, no victim story, no tale of capitalist evil to tell to the public and the workers.

The entire story makes an interesting parallel with our own times. Show me an Obama fanatic, someone for whom this man can do no wrong, no matter how brainless his economic policies or how violent his foreign policies, and I’ll show you a person who hates George W. Bush’s guts—and mostly for the right reasons.

We all saw this coming for the last eight years. Bush took power with Republicans by his side, and rather than using the opportunity to bring about the humbler foreign policy he had promised, or reduce the role of government in our lives, he used his power the way Republicans always have: to betray election promises, explode spending, start pointless wars that garner global enemies, vastly increase regulatory power, and attempt a regimentation of cultural life that impinges on people’s civil rights and liberties.

It was a mix of policies that seemed designed to embolden the Left. By the time the election rolled around, Obama-style socialism was a ripe fruit dangling from a tree. In this sense, a good name for the American Left would be reactionaries, since that seems to be the dominant mode of these people.

This process of right-wing statism giving way to left-wing statism, and back again, provides a summary narrative of the last 100 years of political history, and it is a particularly maddening one for old-style liberals and libertarians, since we see how the two work together, often unbeknownst to the partisans, to build the leviathan state step by step.

It is surely not a far-flung hope that someday societies will learn to reject the militarism and regimentation of the Right without embracing the collectivism and violence against property offered by the Left. And someday perhaps there will come a time when the tide of history will turn back the advances of the Left without emboldening the violence of the Right.

In other words, the goal isn’t reaction but progress through liberty.

68

Catch the Libertarianism If You Can

May 28, 2003

There are some great libertarian themes in Catch Me If You Can, the DVD of which was released earlier this month. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the more or less true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., a kid and master of deception who managed to work as a teacher, a physician, an attorney and prosecutor, and an airline pilot, all before his 18th birthday.

Frank sets out on his life of lies after a family tragedy, draws the attention of the FBI for his financial scams, and eludes agent Carl Hanratty (played by Tom Hanks) for a very long time. Then he cuts his prison term short by agreeing to work for the FBI in its financial crimes division.

Before we get to the libertarianism implied in the film, there is a downside. The film is no more or less complicated that the three sentences above. There are no interesting twists or turns. It is a linear story, and the plot, sequence of action, and ending are known by viewers from the outset. It’s a fine story for an hour-long show or perhaps 100 minutes. But to drag this out to 2 hours and 20 minutes is painful, excruciatingly so.

There is no such thing as a captive audience, as Steven Spielberg surely knows. The problem is that he is the director and producer, and also owns Dreamworks, which released the film. There must not be anyone at the studio in a position to tell him that this movie needed to be cut by half. So, I cannot entirely recommend this movie for these reasons alone.

That said, the movie is packed with insights concerning the relationship of the individual to the state. For starters, Frank’s family life is shattered by the IRS, which begins to hound his father for tax evasion. There is no indication that his dad did anything other than attempt to keep the money he made. He was found out and financially ruined, the family house, car, and income all taken by the state. (Throughout the ordeal, Frank’s dad issues idle threats to sue the IRS.) Seeking financial security, Frank’s mom then runs off with Frank’s father’s boss.

Young Frank is overcome with shock that his father, once a corporate bigshot and pillar of the community, is being ground down by the government into the status of a pauper, that his family that was once so stable is no more, that he himself, once a privileged child of wealth, is suddenly thrust into the public-school miasma. Thus begins the cynicism and the perception that life is all a racket anyway, that we live in world in which what we think is true turns out to be a fragile construction. Social and professional standing can be granted or taken away by arbitrary edicts issued by powerful people.

Being 17 years old, he doesn’t adopt a political ideology, but there is a tacit force at work in his later decisions to deceive the world: he is setting out to prove that a world so imposed upon by state edict is something of a hoax and hence easy to trick. He wants to do the honors as a way of showing that his father was not so much guilty as unlucky. In this way, he seems to be working to avenge his father’s humiliation at the hands of the government.

The life of deception begins in public school. Treated rudely by the other students on the first day, he decides to affect the manner of a teacher and rules over the French class as a substitute teacher for a full week. Next he tries the same trick to become an airline pilot by merely having the right badge and uniform, then a doctor by merely forging a diploma, and finally an attorney through forgery and various distraction tactics. He finances his operations through check fraud, turning pieces of paper into spendable cash through elaborate financial trickery.

The choice of these professions is significant. They are all professions in which the government exercises an unusual degree of control over who is in and who is out. To understand the difference between these professions and others, imagine a person who attempts to fool people by pretending to be a software designer. Now, if such a fellow designs great software, who is to say that he really isn’t a software designer? He has a marketable skill and markets it. If he doesn’t design useful software, he is fired and that is the end of the story. If he lied in his application, he is a jerk but not a criminal.

In a free market, what a person is is determined by how well a person does. But it’s different in state-controlled professions. You can be a great doctor but without the license to practice, you are guilty of a serious crime. The same is true in aviation and law. It is not enough to be good at what you do. You must jump through hoops held by politicians and bureaucrats. The fraud at the heart of pretending to be a lawyer is not that you are not a good one but that you have not obeyed the regulations that govern who is in and who is out. What’s more, the film doesn’t encourage us to be scandalized by Frank’s deceptions but rather to admire his ability to work within and around the system.

The FBI is after him mainly for his financial crimes. He forges checks and cashes them, being careful to time his activities in such a way that he gets the cash before the fraud is revealed. The film makes no comment on the activities of the Federal Reserve, but when this institution buys bonds from the government, it is merely creating the money out of thin air and pumping it into the economy via its preferred bond dealers. Is what Frank is doing privately really that much more shocking than what the Fed does as a matter of its own daily operations? After all, it was a Fed official who only recently bragged of the institution’s ability to engage in a kind of alchemy.

Eventually, of course, Frank is caught, but the story doesn’t end there. He has become so skilled at forgery that his services at spotting the real from the fake are sought out by the FBI. His prison term is lessened in exchange for his agreement to work for the state. By agreeing to help the government, presto, he goes from world-class criminal to respectable bureaucrat, one who is helping enforce the law. His shift from jailbird to jailer is officially sanctioned and hence not considered deception.

The switch seems to be the mirror image of the switch in his father, who went from respectable professional to an impoverished member of the working class, also at the stroke of a pen. When the state defines who is rich and who is poor, who is a lawyer and who is not, who is a criminal and who is a criminal catcher, we enter into a world driven by the arbitrariness of power, and that power has real and shocking effects on people’s lives: making and breaking the human will itself.

Spielberg is a specialist at Americana, and with this film he has captured the hidden resentment that many feel toward the regimentation of life that has come with the hegemony of state over society. The distinctions between real and phony, even between criminal and crime-stopper, become blurry and fleeting. Frank Abagnale, Jr., was brilliant at playing a game that the state plays on an ongoing basis.

69

Time and Justice

June 20, 2001

Hit-in-the-head movies are usually pathetic. Some guy takes a fall and learns to see the world a new way, which invariably involves becoming more politically correct and marrying a feminist, or some such thing. Memento is not to be confused with one of these. It is surely one of the most brilliant and innovative films to come along in years.

I can only compare my reaction to Memento to the first time I saw The Godfather: here is something completely new and unexpected, yet completely integrated and successful, that sheds all new light on the medium and the subject. That subject is time and how we perceive it. But it goes beyond that to touch even on the moral universe. This movie is so good, and so smart, that you want to watch the whole thing over again just as it ends.

Memento is a thriller that tells the story of Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce), who has the mission of finding and killing the survivor of two men who broke into his home and raped and killed his wife. Leonard suffered a head injury in the attack, so now he has this “condition”: he has no short-term memory. He knows who he is and where he is from. He knows that he was a happy husband and a claims investigator for a life-insurance company. But he cannot remember anything after the terrifying night when his wife was attacked. He does know that he has this memory problem and that he must seek vengeance.

Despite this crippling problem, he is determined to carry on. Because he cannot form new memories, he must snap photos of things he wants to recall later on. He carries pictures of the hotel he is staying at, the car he drives, and people he meets. He must make judgements about the characters of people and write them down, because he knows that the next time he sees them, he will not remember their name or face. Once something is written down on a photo, or tattooed to his body, it is fixed in place. If it is not written down, the information is lost.

Each day he wakes up unsure about where he is and what he is supposed to do. He must reorient himself completely, not to remind himself of what he knows but to form a complete impression from scratch. He looks in the mirror to read that his purpose in life is to find the man or men who killed his wife. He finds notes, written the previous day, that tell him where to go and who to meet, and why he should meet them and whether he can trust them. His memory fades far more quickly than 24 hours, however. It appears to last about 10 to 15 minutes, so Leonard has to rush to keep himself on track, and so does the viewer of this film.

Leonard explains that there are advantages to living this way. Memory is notoriously unreliable as a guide, he says. But we can trust facts, and he records facts about the attacker as he finds them. This, he says, puts him in the same position as a police investigator who must put emotional distance between himself and the crime. He discovers the facts and, with the aid of the police report, he pieces together the mystery to find the person he is after. He seems to get closer and closer to solving the mystery.

Leonard is once asked why he wants to kill the attacker, since, after all, even if he finds the guy and kills him, Leonard is not likely to remember it. Leonard responds very intelligently. It’s true, he says, that he may not remember. But vengeance is not a subjective state of mind but rather a fact of reality. So it doesn’t actually matter whether he carries with him the subjective sense. What matters is that justice is done, period.

We cheer. In fact, we admire him because, all in all, Leonard seems to manage very well with his condition. We follow him in hot pursuit of the bad guy through many very intense scenes, and in this respect the film is old-fashioned. In one very funny scene, he is fleeing a man who is trying to gun him down and suddenly his memory fades. He thinks to himself: “Okay, what are we doing here? I’m chasing this man … no, wait, he is chasing me!”

Oh, but there’s a bit more to it. You see, the film is cut up into some 30 or 40 separate pieces, and the viewer watches the film in backwards chronology, starting with the last scene first. At each scene, we find ourselves in a completely unfamiliar setting, which we then must back out of to discover how we got there in the first place. As the action proceeds, or recedes, we know only what Leonard knows and only a fraction of what everybody else in the film knows about the same people and events.

To keep the story line stitched together the viewer must juggle scenes and dates, remembering places and characters from previous scenes that are actually in the future. This technique places the viewer in something like the same state of mind as Leonard: a radical disorientation of time and place. We struggle to orient ourselves at roughly the same pace as Leonard. To top it off, there is a parallel story line that runs underneath (shown in black and white) that moves in forward chronology, until the forward and backward stories meet in the end (which is the beginning of the story).

The overall effect is spectacular. I know of no movie that is more flattering to the intelligence of the viewer. But I don’t want to create an impression that this is some typical art-house psychodrama about the human condition. It’s a corkscrew of a movie, but it truly works from top to bottom with not a hint of pseudo-profundity. You can’t help but be intensely curious about every aspect of Leonard’s life and how he handles it. You have to be, for if you turn your attention away even for a moment, you could miss some crucial piece of information.

What do we gain from this film? We come away with an understanding of how central the passage of time, and the gathering of information, is for our subjective impressions of the world. The ability to gather information differs from person to person, and our own personal sense of the passage of time has the most powerful effect on how we behave, on how we regard our place in the social and moral order.

If that were all this movie was about, we might just dismiss the film as a typical lefty effort to say that the world is no more or less than what we make of it in our own minds. But no, this film doesn’t stop there: it shows that no matter how we perceive time or events, there is an objective world, even an objective ethic, out there that we must confront and cannot avoid. There is truth, whether we or not we see it and even if we choose not to see it–even if we cannot see it.

There’s a political dimension here too. We learn that artificially shortened time horizons (which is what Leonard had and what government imposes on society through, e.g., inflation and welfare) creates internal panic and external chaos. We come to understand the degree to which civilization depends on the ability to plan for the long-term, accumulate information, make sound judgements based on that information, learn from error, and reverse our course of action if the need presents itself.

You sometimes hear it said of a great movie that you must rush to see it on the big screen. It’s probably not true with this one. You can wait until the DVD comes out. It is a low-budget number from Newmarket Films, and has no special visual effects and no sex scenes and very little violence (but it is still rated R).

But judging by its numbers, audiences have warmed to it right away. After 14 weeks it has grossed $17 million and stayed in the top 15. The number of theaters in which it is released increases by the day. Writer/director Chris Nolan has done something spectacular here, and he deserves to be rewarded with commercial success.

70

It’s a Jetsons World

January 11, 2002

It occurred me last weekend that children should not grow up without a thorough exposure to the great cartoon from 1962, The Jetsons. Its celebration of technology and commerce, its retro-style optimism, its hilarious dovetailing of bourgeois normalcy with gizmo-crazed futurism, its complete absence of political correctness (excluding, of course, the atrocious 1990 movie by the same name)—all combine to make this one of the great cartoon achievements of any time.

The answer was simple: obtain a set of DVDs that have the complete series, all 80 episodes made over time. What a dream! It turns out, however, that such a thing doesn’t exist. Well, there’s always video, but it turns out that these are very hard to find. Where to start? Amazon.com. Search. Nothing. I’m told that the Cartoon Network runs them, but I don’t have cable.

But wait. Here’s a private individual in the Midwest advertising on Amazon who has one to sell. One click. Moments later, the owner sends an email, telling me that he has two episodes on video, at $3 each, no shipping charges. I Paypal him $6, and the videos arrive by UPS three days after it became clear that The Jetsons was indispensable. I thank him, he thanks me, and everyone is happy.

What a world we live in, where such transactions can take place with such ease! No slogging through downtown and looking through racks of videos. No checks or cash or even credit cards. And it’s all private, just a slight peek into the magical, wonderful world of the market economy that allows me to obtain in minutes an obviously rare copy of a cartoon made thirty years ago and show it to my kids in my own private home.

The fellow who sent these videos isn’t officially designated by the statistics collectors as a retailer. He probably didn’t go to business school or take marketing classes. He’s just a guy with a good video collection; the service ethic he displays was something taught to him by the dictates of the market economy itself and its relentless insistence that the interests of the consumer come first.

Now, please don’t accuse me of “worshiping at the altar of the market.” Worship is something owed to transcendent beings. In heralding the magic of the marketplace, I am simply recognizing that there is nothing on this earth as wonderfully productive and service-oriented as commercial society, and its glories are never more obvious than when contrasted with the work of government. Let government brag about its ability to raze whole countries; the impossibly wonderful ability of the market to coordinate the needs and desires of billions, while exceeding the expectations of everyone, is far more inspiring.

And don’t say that market is merely delivering trivial junk like The Jetsons. First, it’s not trivial; it’s fun. Second, by the same methods, my family obtains DVDs that teach French and Latin, rare books on ancient civilization and history, CDs featuring music from the High Renaissance, and clothing that is cheaper and of higher quality than anything available locally. In addition to providing entertainment, the market is serving humanity in all of its highest aspirations.

In any case, the Jetsons videos did not disappoint. In the first episode, George is feeling a financial pinch because his son wants to go to spaceball camp and his daughter needs a new gown for the prom. Meanwhile, his wife is stepping up her usual spending habits. George begins to moonlight as a taxidriver and is nearly fired from his day job (again!) for doing so. Fortunately he wins the Venus lottery (in currency units valued at 75 cents on the dollar), but unfortunately his family then goes on a wild spending spree even before the payoff arrives.

Meanwhile, his company, Spacely Sprockets, is faced with a takeover attempt by some corporate raiders from Venus, which is apparently enjoying economic boom times. Mr. Spacely appeals to George to help him buy more stock to keep the company from falling into Venusian hands.

The plot thickens in every which way until the devastating news arrives that Venus’s economy has collapsed and the currency has been devalued. It is now worth a tenth of a penny on the dollar. The takeover attempt is held back but George is now faced with a mountain of debt. The whole story of the inflated Venusian currency sounds like Argentina today!

In the other episode, the main competition of Spacely Sprockets, Cogswell Cogs, moves next door in an apparent attempt to spy. Mr. Spacely hands George the plans for the property and demands that George figure out a way to build a high wall. George’s son Elroy notices that the Cogswell Cogs building is six inches over the property line! Mr. Spacely celebrates the news and demands that Cogswell move his building.

A beaten Cogswell goes along until he notices that George had the plans upsidedown, and that it’s Spacely who is over the property line! Now Cogswell demands that Spacely move. George is fired (again) until one day, when poking around his old office space, George notices a city zoning inspector measuring the Cogswell building to find it six inches higher than regulations permit. The zoning police decree that the Cogswell building be torn down! George delivers the great news to Mr. Spacely, only to have Spacely announce the news that instead of moving his building, he had agreed to buy Cogswell’s now-worthless property!

Of course both episodes feature the technologies that made The Jetsons famous: the fold-up flying cars, the space boots that walk on walls and ceilings, the floating and moving sidewalks, and every manner of robot. There are also plenty of old-tech items, like cigars, which are used as a prop to signify prosperity. The Jetsons cartoons foresaw the day when huge numbers of workers would sit at terminals with screens. Note too that while there is a massive amount of personal freedom in the world of The Jetsons, there are also many government-caused annoyances like zoning regulations and financial bubbles.

Some of the advanced technology in The Jetsons looks old-hat by today’s standards. Jane’s facsimile dress selector looks like a 1970s movie projector that merely broadcasts an image. Nothing special there. And Elroy’s enviro-simulator is impressive but no more so than today’s video games. The mail is fast, but it is physical!

Other episodes I recall from childhood that are apparently unavailable: the contest between Astro the real dog and Lectronimo the robot dog; the episodes featuring the menacing cat burglar; the one where Jane gets fed up with public transportation and decides to take driving lessons.

And this episode as detailed on the unofficial Jetsons site sounds great:

G.I. Jetson: Private Jetson is drafted, as George is a family man he gets a full two minutes to report for duty. They’re all given an aptitude test, and one not-so-bright recruit jams a square peg into a round hole, whereupon the automated grading program determines that his “original thinking shows leadership potential” and makes him a general.

Alas, I can’t yet obtain it. Someday perhaps. The free market’s work is never done. In honor of this great show and the family-friendly market it celebrates, listen to its exhilarating theme song (http://www.cybercomm.nl/~ivo/download/jetsons_theme.mp3).

71

Nixon!

January 14, 2009

Some personal history on my impressions of Richard Nixon:

My earliest memories of Nixon involve Watergate, and my father’s outrage that a third-rate burglary would be the stuff of national scandal. He figured it was a racket.

The public school distributed copies of the Weekly Reader, packed with pious propaganda and high dudgeon over the entire incident. I was alone in my elementary school to rise in his defense, thereby outraging teachers and administrators.

It was years later that I threw myself into reading the prehistory: the Hiss/Chambers trials of 1949 and Nixon’s role as the leader of the prosecution. Later I learned of his horrible role in creating the EPA and making the dollar pure paper, as well as instituting price controls. As I came to understand war as a species of socialism, the ebb flowed again with appreciation for his role in opening up China and for starting arms talks with the Soviet Union.

So is Nixon someone I respected? Yes. His good-government critics have always disgusted me. At the same time, one has to agree with Rothbard that his impeachment/resignation was a great moment, if only because it demonstrated the vulnerability of the presidency. It discredited the power elite and finalized the break with the old world in which everyone was supposed to love and adore and obey the commander president.

One the one hand, on the other hand … in saecula saeculorum.

This is a summary of my own view, so I’m completely dazzled by Oliver Stone’s extraordinary 1995 film Nixon, which I hadn’t seen until this week. The film further complicates the picture of this man with a portrayal that is brutally honest about his flaws but also surprisingly affectionate in the end. In the course of telling the story, Stone also manages to telescope a revisionist political history of the last fifty years.

I can easily imagine that the Stone haters are already screaming at this article: “This film is nothing but a smear rooted in wacky conspiracy theories. The film strongly suggests that Nixon had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, for goodness sake! How dare you try to shore up the credibility of this Stone loon and his stupid movies!”

Well, you know what? The Stone rendition is not made up. It is drawn from published accounts from people who don’t accept the official view of things, and it draws together many threads from different narratives that tell a story that is not entirely implausible. In fact, the workings of power that are portrayed here have much in common with an ancient narrative we associate with Shakespeare’s telling of the history of Rome. It also fits with everything we know about power and Washington.

Stone’s version of history has Nixon making a deal with the CIA and a powerful group of Cuban exiles in the early 1960s. Following the Bay of Pigs invasion, which the exiles believed was botched because Kennedy was not wholly on board, the exiles arranged for Kennedy’s assassination. Nixon was their chosen man for whom they hoped to gain the White House, but they had to clear a path for him to achieve this goal. The group that put him in the White House adored his war on Vietnam but turned on him furiously over his overtures first to China and then Russia, and so unleashed the hell that ended up bringing him down.

That’s the theory. But even if you reject it, there is a solid reason for watching this. Folks today know virtually none of the essential political history behind the Nixon story. This is a great way to be introduced to it all, from Hiss/Chambers through the 1970s and following, even up to Reagan’s revenge against Nixon’s peace overtures. You will discover important moments in postwar history that are hardly ever mentioned in public school; actually, they are darn near forgotten.

There is even much to learn here about Vietnam, the student protests, the end of the war and how strangely uneventful it was, and so much more about the political culture of the time. The presidents’ men look and behave exactly the way I remembered from when I was a child. The whole movie for me personally is a blast from a past that lives in my mind as only a vague shadow.

Anthony Hopkins does an amazing job playing Nixon, and many of his speeches and press conferences are true-to-life recreations. The impression of the man is highly sympathetic to him personally. He comes across as a disordered person, touched by paranoia and vexed by fear. But he was also a victim in many ways—though not in as many ways as he believed. His character in power was frightening; his character as a man was fearful and confused and cold but pathetically likeable in the end.

Young people who demand an explosion every 10 seconds and a sex scene every 15 minutes will find the movie boring, no question. It is heady, smart, and detailed, and the real action here is very subtle and bound up with intrigue and plot. The picture of life in the White House is unforgettable. It is beautifully filmed, but I can easily see why mainstream audiences wouldn’t just drink it up. It is a profoundly serious movie.

Call this film fiction if you want, but something tells me that there is more truth here than official histories admit. Mostly what this film teaches is something about the nature of power. Oliver Stone’s greatest gift is his refusal to treat the American system as something supernaturally protected from the corruption that has been endemic to all regimes in the history of the world. For daring to reject the civic religion, he is routinely castigated as a Marxist lunatic.

Watch this and see if that reputation holds up in light of this film, which strikes me as a modern classic.