Stop The Spirit of Zossen 2.0

WHAT: Focus Film’s Clooney vehicle based on Brit Martin Booth’s 1990 novel ‘The American’.

WHERE: A state-of-the-art multiplex theater nested in the heart of an Imperial City suburban enclave teaming with massive defense contracting presences and nearby government installations.

THE AUDIENCE: Theater 45% filled, average age probably mid 50s, three or so younger couples in 20s to early 30s.

THE REACTION: A few sniggers and guffaws erupted during the movie (more on that below) followed by sustained booing. Yes, sustained booing from a 50-60 year old demo in mannered D.C. One woman in her later 50s yelled out ‘I want my money back !!’ She got energetic applause and more laughs. People jeered the credits, muttered to themselves, and left mocking it all.

We doubled back to the theater for other reasons and caught the last 5 minutes of a late showing. This younger crowd, mostly couples in their 20s, didn’t boo. But they did laugh at and during the ending. Departing they cheerfully chatted ‘wow that was really bad’ and so on. Perhaps it’s true, the young can shake off unpleasantness more easily.

ALL OF THEM TOOK THE HIT FOR YOU, DEAR READER. It’s really awful. And no, MSNBC, Clooney is not the American James Bond.

‘The American’ fails on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s really three movies: (i) about Clooney (“Edward”), a vague assassin without institutional or professional context; (ii) a bizarrely reverential tribute to a dull blue Fiat auto; and (iii) a sketchy romance between Edward and the winning Violante Placido.

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Here’s a hope that everyone enjoys the weekend. That you, Dear Reader, can tune out the media led fixation on the ankle biters downtown.

It’s an unholy brew. A rootless media seeks any form of self-generating narrative for lazy producing, story selection, Nielsens and click throughs. And the Movement? It follows centuries of Counter Enlightenment impulsive tradition using public theater to create false narratives and communal identity. All fodder for the 15 minute news cycle and shallow tweets.

We chose to visit Annapolis to start off the weekend. Sure, it’s long been a tourist trap. And like nearby D.C. it’s self-satisfied, bloated and keenly aware of its wealth. Still, it’s not far up Route 50. The Severn River retains echoes of boating memories many decades ago. Plus, traffic to the overcrowded (and even more overbuilt) Delaware beaches too daunting. One notable thing – young men in their twenties lounging around the Naval Academy entrance wearing the old ‘Blackwater’ paw t-shirts and Oakleys. Without irony, too.

Where were we? Oh right. The high school play downtown.

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‘They’ used to say (incorrectly) the Wehrmacht never did winter offensives. ‘They’ now could say (correctly) Democrats can’t do offensives at all.

Facebook burps and random tweets send allegedly professional politicians and paid talking heads into hissy fits. Rightists play Democrats and much of their AgitProp infrastructure like a piano. Badly, of course.

Democrats seemingly learned nothing from 2001-2008. None of them, individually, their AgitProp allies or their (moribund) institutions demonstrate any understanding of ideological politics in today’s disassociated society of ambient social connections. It’s doubtful they will learn in time to forestall Revanchism. Such congenital failure suffocates aspirations and hopes of all non-Rightists. In retrospect 2008 was indeed a fluke, made possible by economic catastrophe, a failed presidency and timely story rather than anything inherently ‘Democratic’.

A feckless Administration addicted to expediency of course undermines meme cohesion and focus. Still, it’s no excuse for others purporting to be our Thought Leaders and Meme Givers to act like it’s still 2005 and the Movement controls all branches of government. Yet that’s exactly what they do every day, hyperventilating over a random Facebook burp or tweet airball. One insignificant flick and an entire news cycle is given to the Rightists on their terms on their issues. Over time, the cumulative impact is that what began as some trivial Rightist gesture dictates framing of our simulacra of consensus reality. The hysterical overreactions cascade like a signal chain in an amplifier until what emerges is nothing but distortion.

Democrats and their AgitProp allies truly don’t understand that the Movement could never have coalesced and reformed without their essential – and hapless – complicity.

Of course the economy is in ruins. A failed war is inescapable. We’re not unmindful of the political terrain. Faith in government competence and legitimacy at historic lows. Not all Democratic AgitProp allies are addicted to victimhood. Some focus on identifying new candidates and new funding for the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Until their time, we are presented a false choice. In the end, whether on the more gentle accomodationist curve of this current Democratic clique or with the spasmodic inchoate raging of the Rightists, we eventually arrive in essentially the same place. One just offers the scenic route.

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Watching MSNBC’s breathless ‘exclusive’, ‘historic’ coverage of one portion of the U.S. military slither out of Iraq, you’d never know there was a ‘Bloom Mobile’ during the yahoo! invasion. You’d never know that MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for being vocally anti-war during the run up. In fact, MSNBC and NBC collectively completely airbrushed away their own culpability peddling the lies, falsehoods and propaganda that helped launch America’s modern day Syracuse Expedition.

MSNBC, like Oceania, has always been anti-war. So we get Tweety, who only stopped fluffing Neocons, DeLay et al. and the Administration in September 2006. MSNBC’s fabricated narrative is every bit as insidious and corruptive as that peddled by the Neocons and the Bush Administration. If the MSNBC third stringers want to pose and pretend they are going to hold people accountable, how about starting with their own network? Why is is that Tim Russert was Dick Cheney’s favorite (easiest) interview as Mary Matalin let slip? How many retired generals – oops, Senior Mentors — did MSNBC put on to explain how painless it was all going to be?

It’s a bit astounding to see Laurence O’Donnell – who, if you didn’t know, once was a staff director on a senate committee – repeatedly interrupt Jack Jacob’s military critique not just of the occupation but the half-assed and almost calamitous Rumsfeld/Franks invasion plan itself. (We’ve talked about the operational and logistical near disasters at length elsewhere). MSNBC is comfortable with that distinction – the ‘war’ went great (as all the then media cheerleaders still broadcasting need to believe) but the occupation was a bungle. Jacobs wasn’t having any of it but was cut off. Instead, we get a former Senate staffer babbling about how Americans vacation in Vietnam today, and wouldn’t it be nice if that happened too in a future Iraq. (By the way, Jacobs went to Vietnam after combat troops were withdrawn and saw combat every day; he is also is the first to underscore Vietnam is not Iraq re above).

The entire night was stunt journalism pornography at its worst, devoid almost entirely of real insight. No effort at all to put in context if this is the sad, pathetic end to the Warlord’s Operation Iraqi Excellent Adventure, what was MSNBC’s role in getting it going? Who did they put on air? Repeatedly? If MSNBC wants to be the Obama Administration’s version of Fox that’s their business and ethical call. The American people, however, rightly should and must remember MSNBC and those who so lustily shouted down doubt and criticism during the run-up.

We’re just going to say it a bluntly as we can: MSNBC, you, too, have blood on your hands. You’re just too mindless and irresponsible to notice.

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John Richardson’s Esquire piece ‘Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican’ gets it right. We liked Marianne when she was there intimately engaged during Newt’s rise. A sharp, quick mind and personality of her own, she was easily at home with policy thrust and parry dinner conversations. And provided a social grace very much in need.

Esquire’s quotes and details all ring true. Will it make a difference? Esquire hints at but doesn’t delve into the larger question. What of the weird state of Republican positioning Summer 2010? Those who loathe Palin flock to any signs of another Newt tease. Odd, because they mock Palin for being an air headed Neocon sock puppet while applauding Newt’s far more radical and dangerously incoherent ‘Camus’ blather at AEI.

He’s the walking University of Phoenix, sure. But his dilettantism at least comes with a faux degree in seriousity that Joe Klein accepts. In these de-stabilized times, Newt poses a far graver danger as either a pretend or actual presidential candidate than Palin ever could. His revels in expediency, destruction and irresponsibility are gasoline seeking a fire.

He wears the tight smile of a man who has very little room to move. He is known for his rhetorical napalm and is not accustomed to acknowledging that he often deploys it for its own sake, facts and gross exaggeration be damned. You don’t build a movement by playing fair. He didn’t single-handedly topple forty years of Democratic rule in the House by strictly keeping Marquess of Queensberry rules. And so in Newt’s world, putting Barack Obama in the company of Neville Chamberlain to win a news cycle is just the way it’s done. The grimace on his face says, What part of this game don’t you understand? His assistant looks at his watch. “We have three minutes.”

He will not relax, will not let down his guard, not this time around. He did that once when he was younger, spent three days with a reporter who got his staff to complain of his sexual adventurism and saw him yelling at an assistant. Afterward, he mentioned the episode to Robert Novak, who said, “What the fuck were you thinking?” . . .

After that, Gingrich started to deteriorate. There were times, Marianne says, when he wasn’t functioning. He started yelling at people, which he’d never done before, and he’d get weirdly “overfocused” on getting things done — manic, as if he was running out of time. He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he wasn’t aware or didn’t care how strange it looked. The staff responded with gallows humor: “He’s a sociopath, but he’s our sociopath.”

And this:

There’s a large part of me that’s four years old,” he tells you. “I wake up in the morning and I know that somewhere there’s a cookie. I don’t know where it is but I know it’s mine and I have to go find it. That’s how I live my life. My life is amazingly filled with fun . . . It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Worth reading the whole thing.

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The question came about 5 minutes into utterly trivial ‘Salt.’ Americans grovel before a larval Counter-Intelligence State (a term the deservedly respected, former DIA veteran John Dziak so aptly used for the Soviet Union). America’s tolerance for militarization and threat-addiction is so high now it shrugs off formerly toxic-level dosages without notice. So why can’t it make a good spy movie?

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(N.B.: this originally was posted in the comments section but upon reflection think it deserves its own post. No worries, no effort to impersonate Krauthammer or a certain Senate Majority Leader with the deliberately stylized prose. Just some observations).

Narcissism is an occupational hazard for political leaders. You have to have an outsized ambition and an outsized ego to run for office.

Stanley Renshon

The Right’s compulsive need to maintain its Narrative within which all adherents can act out their own form of idealized Self is essentially collective narcissism. That’s offered as a lay person’s experience working, talking, and socializing with them over decades. From the Newts of the world to the most vicious ‘unknowns’ (except today the latter likely have so many Facebook ‘friends’ they have their own ‘fan’ page).

Narcissistic need to support a fantasized, grandiose self-image within a larger heroic Narrative explains alot. Not just the daily evidence of disconnect between actual behavior and the projected idealized (often censoring) personality. The post 2008 purge and radicalization are inevitable consequence. A complimentary analytical framework from a conventional political/historical perspective of Movements here and on the Continent.

Narrative radicalization and escalating vehemence through cant and acting out must — by internal logic — treble when fantasy can not surmount the limits imposed by Objective Reality (say Nov. 2008). Obama’s victory is a crisis threatening the ability to segregate their disassociated fantasized self-image with their often fragmented and undeveloped self. Why anyone remotely close to the Movement who said after defeat “now is the time for introspection” was doomed to be mau maued and kicked off the island. And Lord help you if there was a photo with you hugging Obama . . .

On one extreme one gets birthers. Another? Secession. And so on. They’re really the same. Their commonality is an irrational imperative to retreat to a safe Narrative that protects their idealized, fantasy Self. From that Barlett-esque non-emprical world adherents safely can continue to use the objective external world as a mere prop in their own internal movie.

This is in marked contrast with more normative modes of collecting and processing input, cognition and productions of ‘knowledge’ below:

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What’s worse? The Movement in amoral full flight or mewling and whining on ‘the Left’ [sic], with tiresome gnashing of teeth and typing in dismay? Always despairing the [Senegalese?] referee’s failure to pull a Red Card, to make clear To The Whole World the score a blatant, invalid Rightist foul?

Josh Marshall’s swan dive into the victimization pool is rather typical:

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene (emphasis added). It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.

Marshall’s diversionary examples are sophomorically inapposite. And irrelevant. Notice how the Administration’s premature panic, collusion and later attempt to brush it all away is literally acknowledged as just ‘disappointing’ (with Vilsack alone holding the bad)? The real story, according to TPM? Fox made them do it. (Note the perpetually passive psychological construct?)

Kos was wrong lamenting about this phenomenon (pathology?) 6 years ago. It’s not at all like he said – they [Dems et al.] always bring knives to a gunfight. ‘The Left’ [sic] bring nothing. And then scream for Mommy and Daddy. We wouldn’t want to give Dr. Krauthammer an idea for a column (without residuals) but there is something deeper going on.

What exactly has to happen in Marshall’s world for non-Righists to function effectively? He doesn’t know. We like TPM and have from day one when it was a simple blog. This is a friendly reader’s exasperation. TPM and its readers need an intervention. We’ll leave that to the pros. But in the interim, here’s free advice. Stop flinching and stop ‘enabling’ flinchers. Be careful what you wish for, too, re getting a ‘ref’. Maybe Josh never played competitive sports. Or had a different experience. In ours, even referees get tired of premature flinchers and secretly despise them.

Can you imagine the coup d’etat that would have happened somewhere along 1992-2000 with this crowd? By what year do you think Rush or Newt would have driven Clinton into house arrest at the Streisand Estate? And seized the (newly enlarged) crown out of the Pope’sAiles’ hands and put it on his swollen head? Recall Tweety *and* Hitch shoulder-to-shoulder cheering Newt and Ken Starr on like high school cheerleaders. Notwithstanding Clinton basically *was* a good Republican president, to boot.

On such gossamer thin strands hope rests.

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One central conceit of Chris Nolan’s movie ‘Inception’ is that an idea, once planted, is unstoppable. No direct spoilers below – unless you follow links. Providing spoilers requires more cognitive commitment than just watching it.

‘Inception’ is supposed to pass for ‘high concept’ science fiction these days. Some compare it to Fellini’s ’8 1/2′ – seriously. (Bonus points if you knew before Googling where CHUD came from). Remember all those now tenured faculty launching careers ‘revealing’ hidden subtexts in the first three Star Wars movies? Same deal, geekier arena.

People playing the pundit game these days are no different. We remember leaving ‘Attack of the Clones’ with a national security type and spouse. The spouse — whom you may even read on the Interwebs now — was crestfallen, bemoaning all those years studying the VHS tapes . . . wasted. So one might want to wait before writing off the ‘Inception’-Fellini meme. It may have a long half-life.

If it’s not Fellini, what is it? It’s doing good business for one thing. The movie boasts a remarkable 85% ‘fresh’ rating from Rotten Tomatoes. New Yorker critic David Denby doesn’t buy it. We’ll let you decide. Despite the ads, this movie works as well on a big screen now, Cinemax later or even computer monitor.

We do think Fellini Chris Nolan is on to at least one thing. A week ago we read this review declaring ‘Inception’ to be a calamitous pitch of Clooney’s self-admiring ‘Ocean’s 11′ meets ‘The Matrix’. Clever, actually – and funny if you remember Buck Henry’s pitch meeting in ‘The Player.’

The relevant point? The reviewer kept mocking Di Caprio as ‘fetus face’. Childish. Dismissible.

So it’s a week later. In a movie theater surrounded by people who subscribe to AARP magazine (we ignore the direct mail). They really do reach and turn off their cellphones when told to do so before the previews, etc. Then the movie. And from scene one all we could do was keep thinking ‘fetus face.’ Scene after scene. Until final credits. You see, an idea, once planted really is unstoppable. We were . . . incepted, if you will.

Someone could just say ‘Hey Stiftung, check out this queen of hearts, yo!’ More succinct. Ten bucks saved. No fetal imagery. If ‘Inception’ is the price for at least one future greenlit good sci-fi movie ‘to cash in’, a reasonable down payment. A shame it couldn’t ever plausibly be compared to ‘Satyricon’.

But did you know you are being incepted now as you read this? You *will* remember this exact moment years in the future. When someone turns to explain the deep subtexts within the first ‘Inception Trilogy’. You will wake up. In America.

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