April 7, 2020
April 6, 2020
The Virtues
As long as New York’s movie theaters are closed, I will be pivoting toward VOD films that my socially-distancing readers should appreciate. With very little to keep you going except Netflix, et al, I hope to keep you abreast of films off the beaten track. With that in mind, I highly recommend “The Virtues” that is now available through Topic, a streaming service backed by First Look Media. First Look Media is part of Pierre Omidyar’s left-of-center media empire that also includes Intercept. Considered controversial by some, I find Omidyar generally on the side of the angels.
“The Virtues” appeared originally as a four-part series on Channel 4 in England in 2019. It is the story of Joseph, a working-class guy with a troubled past. In the first few minutes of the episode, we see him walking over to his ex-wife’s house in Liverpool to have dinner with her, her new partner and his 9-year old son from his former marriage. Joseph learns over dinner that they are leaving for Australia where they plan to start new lives. This means that Joseph will be left alone with no social ties, a grim proposition for an alcoholic.
After dinner, Joseph heads to a nearby pub and has one drink after another until he can’t think straight. Desperate for companionship, he begins buying drinks for everyone until the bartender cuts him off. A sloppy drunk, Joseph tries hard to create a festive mood but you cannot help to see him as someone who laughs to keep from crying. The scene inside the pub starts off on an up note but within a few minutes, you find yourself cringing at the sight of a man trying to buy the affection of strangers to replace the son who will be leaving for Australia.
The next morning we find him sleeping on his living-room floor, his shirt covered with vomit. Even when his boss comes by the apartment to pound on the door to wake him up, Joseph remains dead to the world. When he finally wakes up, he goes to the bathroom where he continues to be sick. In all the years I have been watching films that feature an alcoholic in a lead role, from “The Lost Weekend” to “Flight”, I have never seen a more realistic and more frightening depiction of what’s involved in a drunken binge.
In the next episode, Joseph makes an attempt to create a new social life for himself by traveling back to the small town in Ireland where his sister lives. When she and her husband come outside with their three young children in the morning, they spot Joseph sprawled out on the side of the road. He has not had another drunken spree. Instead, he is so broke that he could not afford a night in a hotel. As he approaches her and the family, they draw back not knowing what this stranger has in mind. We finally learn that he has not seen Anna in 30 years, when they were both at a local orphanage. For all she knew, he might have been dead.
Making up for lost time, the family accepts him with an open heart even as Joseph soon resorts to old habits. It turns out that he is walking around with a heavy cross to bear from a trauma that occurred at the orphanage. Coming home to Ireland might have brought him closer to a family’s warmth but only at the cost of reliving the suffering he endured at the orphanage.
As Joseph, Stephen Graham turns in a bravura performance. With his character’s self-effacing and warm personality, Graham realizes it completely. From a working-class family, he has struggled with depression and even tried suicide, as Wikipedia reports. He said, “In my early twenties, I suffered from really bad depression and tried to take my own life once. Thankfully, the rope snapped and I’m here today. But I know the loneliness, isolation and feeling you can’t cope in the world.”
“The Virtues” was directed by Shane Meadows who co-wrote the teleplay with Jack Thorne. Meadows, like Graham, had the kind of life experience that would help make such drama so palpably real. Born in 1972, he was the son of a truck driver who discovered the body of child murder victim Susan Maxwell. Initially a suspect in the murder case, his son suffered bullying at school that likely shaped the flashbacks of Joseph’s experiences in the orphanage.
Meadows’s work will remind you of the films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. His characters are down-to-earth working-class people whose dialog is liberally scattered with four-letter words, including the women. Like them, their troubles are ultimately related to their economic frailty. However, it is not just economic conditions that throw up obstacles. In addition, they are victims of unresolvable family contradictions that remind you of the opening sentence in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Subscriptions to Topic cost $5.99 per month and are well worth it, based on this selection. Like most VOD sites, you can have a seven-day trial subscription. Take advantage of it at least to see this powerful family drama.
And while we are on the topic of VOD, let me refer you to some items that have come my way:
Sea Fever: This is a horror movie set on the waters off the coast of Ireland with similarities to “Alien” or “The Thing” but much more reflective about humanity’s troubled relationship to the natural world, a theme obviously related to our current predicament. It will be available on Vudu on April 10th.
Kino Marquee: Kino-Lorber, a film distribution company, has been affected by the closing of arthouse theaters. To make cutting-edge films available as VOD, including Ken Loach’s great “Sorry We Missed You”, they are offering a service described here. Basically, for the price of a ticket you get to see films at home.
The Cinema Tropical Collection: This is the leading distributor of Latin American films in the USA that has now made its films available as VOD. Check the excellent library here.
Film Movement VOD: Like Kino-Lorber, this is a distribution company for arthouse films, including the first-rate “Corpus Christi” that I reviewed in February. As is the case with Kino Marquee, you get to see a film for the price of a ticket in the theater. (https://www.filmmovement.com/in-theaters)
Environmental Online Film Festival
ArtMattan Films Virtual Cinema: ArtMattan is the company behind the Africa Diaspora film festivals I have covered over the years. Rentals are roughly equal to a senior citizen’s ticket in a theater.
Mailchimp/Oscilloscope Laboratories offer free shorts from the latest SXSW film festival.
Film Festival Alliance: Theatrical-At-Home to present inaugural Film Festival Day on April 11.
April 3, 2020
COVID-19 and the “Just-in-Time” Supply Chain
COUNTERPUNCH, APRIL 3, 2020
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
On March 25th, N.Y. Times op-ed columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote about “How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask.” The subtitle certainly went against the grain of what you’d read from a page dominated by Thomas Friedman: “A very American story about capitalism consuming our national preparedness and resiliency.”
Manjoo identified just one of many failures of the Trump administration to be prepared for the epidemic. Alex Azar, the HHS Secretary had testified that there were only about 40 million masks in our domestic stockpiles, around 1 percent of what would be required. Like much else, mask manufacturing had migrated to China in the same way as all other textile industries had long ago.
April 1, 2020
The conspiracist left and the far right: strange bedfellows on COVID-19
Without missing a beat, some of the same people who have dubbed the Douma chlorine attack a false flag are now downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Peter Hitchens, the younger brother of Christopher (and like him an ex-SWP member) used his Daily Mail byline to promote the OPCW “whistleblowers”. Now, he writes bullshit like this:
It is more likely that the panic-mongers, having got their way by spreading alarm and frightening the Prime Minister, are now trying to get us to forget how ludicrous their original claims were. But first let me issue another warning. If the Government do decide to release us from mass arrest, they will say, as Prof Ferguson is doing, that this is because their repressive economy-wrecking measures worked.
We must demand proof, after a thorough independent inquiry, that this is true. For, if it is not, as I very much suspect, then we are in endless danger.
Any government, using the same pretext, can repeatedly put us through this misery, impoverishment and confinement. In the end, like the peoples of other despotisms, we will be grateful to be allowed out at all.
Also chiming in from the United Kingdom is one Piers Robinson, a co-director of Tim Hayward’s pro-Assad Organisation for Propaganda Studies that has been in the forefront of absolving the dictator of chemical weapons attacks. Robinson left his university post last year in order to spend full-time writing the same kind of bullshit as Peter Hitchens. In a March 28th article for the conspiracist Off-Guardian website, Robinson wrote:
The deep-rooted fear of contagious disease, hardwired into the collective consciousness by historical events such as the ‘Black/Bubonic Plague’ and maintained through popular culture (e.g. the Hollywood movies Outbreak and Contagion), means that people are without question highly susceptible to accepting extreme emergency measures whether or not such measures are rational or justified. The New York Times called for America to be put on a war footing in order to deal with Corona whilst former Army General Stanley McChrystal has been invoking his 9/11 experience in order to prescribe lessons for today’s leaders.
As for 9/11, Robinson is a Truther himself. In another article for Off-Guardian, he hailed David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth’s “9/11 Unmasked” as a “diligent and painstaking work”. In a 2006 CounterPunch article titled “The 9/11 Nuts”, Alexander Cockburn referred to an earlier book by Griffin titled “The New Pearl Harbor” as part of the 9/11 conspiracy fever that “threatens to become the ‘socialism’ of the left, and the passe-partout of many libertarians.”
Early on, it became obvious to me that there was an overlap between 9/11 Truthers and the international Bashar al-Assad fan club. In 2012, I wrote a post titled “The Arab Revolt and the Conspiracist Left” that connected the dotted lines:
For some conspiracists, the Jihadist angle is paramount. Al-Qaeda is underneath every bed in the Middle East, a fear that originates with the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001. For people like Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky and Voltairenet’s Thierry Meyssan, the revolts in Libya and Syria are just the latest evidence of CIA plots drawing upon willing Islamist assets.
Meyssan is the author of two “truther” books: 9/11: The Big Lie and Pentagate, a book that argues that a missile rather than a jet hit the Pentagon. Ordinarily, I would discount Meyssan as a typical nutcase but apparently he does have some traction with self-avowed Marxists like the PSL’s Diana Barahona who advised North Star readers:
For a good explanation of who the armed Syrian opposition really is, read “Who is fighting in Syria” by Thierry Meyssan, reporting from Damascus.
If Off-Guardian has been gung-ho on the pandemic being a plot to advance CIA interests globally, other conspiracist websites have demurred. Moon of Alabama, which is the mother-ship of all these pro-Assad, pro-Putin propaganda initiatives, is scared out of its wits. On March 11th, the webmaster, who is based in Germany and never writes in his own name, sounded the alarm in an article titled “Coronavirus – The Hidden Cases – Why We Must Shut Everything Down And Do It Now”. He wrote, “The key thing to do now is ‘social distancing’. As our governments do not act decisively to achieve that it is our personal responsibility to do that ourselves. Everyone must do this to the best of their abilities.”
Joining the conspiracist left is the Christian right and some Fox TV hosts like Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro. (Hannity has backtracked to some degree in keeping with his fealty to Trump, who has also backtracked.)
The most strenuous efforts to make the pandemic look like a Deep State conspiracy originate in Blaze Media, a company founded and headed by Glenn Beck. Like Off-Guardian, Blaze is a fountain of articles minimizing COVID-19’s threat. In a recent article there, it claims that “Coronavirus still much deadlier than the flu, but not as bad as previously reported.” Steve Deace, who has a Blaze TV show, is a total Jesus freak whose Twitter account is filled with daily helpings of disinformation drawn from the same well as Off-Guardian even to the point of echoing the sort of rhetoric associated with the left:
Like the campaigns waged by Off-Guardian to convince us that all chemical attacks in Syria were false flags, the new one minimizing the effects of COVID-19 depends on expert testimony. If Ted Postol and the OPCW “whistleblowers” were the go-to guys for absolving Assad, you see the same names cropping up now that lend credibility to conspiracist thinking.
I first noticed this when David Katz, a diet doctor basically, wrote an op-ed piece for the NY Times titled “Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” You get titles similar to this on Off-Guardian, like the one today titled “Could the Covid19 Response be More Deadly than the Virus?”, written by a 9/11 Truther named Kevin Ryan.
Katz wrote, “We have, to date, fewer than 200 deaths from the coronavirus in the United States — a small data set from which to draw big conclusions. Still, it is entirely aligned with the data from other countries. The deaths have been mainly clustered among the elderly, those with significant chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, and those in both groups.” From this observation, he draws the conclusion that it would be best to segregate the “clustered” minority and allow the rest of society to go to work in order to prevent the “near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned.”
Naturally, neoliberalist meathead Thomas Friedman found Katz’s arguments most convincing even if other medical experts did not. The Dean of the Yale Medical School co-signed a letter to the NY Times taking issue with Katz’s letter. In the byline for his op-ed, Katz was described as a founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. To begin with, Katz no longer has any association with Yale. On top of that, Yale-Griffin has nothing to do with epidemiology. It’s mission is to research the possibility that nutrition can help stave off illnesses. As I said, Katz’s specialty is nutrition, not resisting pandemics.
A Guardian article described Katz as a gun for hire for big food companies, so is it any surprise that he would stump for industry as a whole right now? The article states:
A group of Yale epidemiologists swiftly wrote a letter to the Times, rebutting Katz’s piece. Others pointed out Katz’s lack of credentials and his links to big industry. He was once paid $3,500 an hour as an expert witness in a Chobani legal case to defend the sugar contained in its yoghurts.
Katz has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies including Hershey’s, Kind Bars, the walnut industry and Quaker Oats. The science journalist Nina Teicholz has written about how in some cases, Katz wrote positive articles about those companies after receiving grants.
In addition to citing Katz, Thomas Friedman also cites someone with better credentials, at least:
Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, pointed out in a March 17 essay on statnews.com, that we still do not have a firm grasp of the population-wide fatality rate of coronavirus. A look at some of the best available evidence today, though, indicates it may be 1 percent and could even be lower.
“If that is the true rate,’’ Ioannidis wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.’’
To show how much of an overlap there is between the “left” conspiracists and ideological hacks like Thomas Friedman, Off-Guardian posted a video of Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, just 3 days ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw). Out of morbid curiosity, I watched the entire thing and was stunned to see this Stanford professor refer to the testing of NBA players and statistics drawn from Iceland’s population to buttress his argument that projections about COVID-19’s danger have been grossly exaggerated.
As should be obvious, not a single NBA player has died from COVID-19. For that matter, all of them are in perfect health and in their early 20s for the most part. What else would you expect?
As for Iceland, Ioannidis has written:
Getting information on representative samples of the population is very easy. It has been done in Iceland, where they have a cohort covering most of the national population looking at samples that have been provided. They see that they have an infection rate of 1.0 per cent, and up until now only two people have died. So, out of the 3,500 infected people in Iceland there have been two deaths, which corresponds to an infection fatality rate lower than the common flu.
In 1954, Darrell Huff wrote a book titled “How to Lie With Statistics” that anticipated Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis’s misuse of Iceland’s numbers. Huff maintained that “correlation does not imply causation”. To make sense of Iceland’s numbers, you have to take into account that this is a country that has embraced Scandinavian welfare state institutions. Even if the sparsely populated island has been moving away from the Scandinavian model, as has all the other countries falling within this rubric, it is still light years ahead of the USA. Among the five states, Iceland’s GINI coefficient is 0.246, ranking it as the most equal society following the Scandinavia model. By comparison, the USA’s is 0.391. Most importantly, Iceland has universal health care. With a population that can expect to receive full benefits from cradle to grave, it is likely to be much more capable of dealing with a pandemic.
In any case, Iceland has gone to great lengths to prevent the spread of COVID-19. According to government officials, 11,727 individuals were tested by March 25th. This translates to 32,217 on a per million basis or 0.0322—the highest proportion of tests performed by any individual country. By comparison, the USA has tested one million by now, or 0.0026.
Is it possible that Ioannidis reflects the corporate bias of Stanford’s board of trustees that is headed by a Walmart family scion and that is composed of financial industry CEO’s? Sorry, if that makes me sound like a vulgar Marxist but as Bob Fitch once put it, vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world.
