Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

August 4, 2020

Mayor de Blasio’s doublethinking on Karl Marx

Filed under: Deblasio,housing,New York — louisproyect @ 5:15 pm

Bill de Blasio

Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post made a splash on July 24 with an article titled “de Blasio quotes Karl Marx in WNYC radio interview”. This red-baiting exercise begins:

First it was Che Guevara — now it’s Karl Marx!

Mayor Bill de Blasio reached back to his salad days as a young radical to quote the father of communism on Friday.

As for the source of the Karl Marx quote, it was during the course of an interview that NPR’s Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio to comment on a Politico article that made the mayor sound like a fire-breathing radical. Instead of “reaching out now to business leaders in the city” for help with various problems, he shut the door on this possibility by focusing on “inequality and wanting to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and things like that.”

de Blasio responded:

I think, look, there’s an underlying truth in the fact that my focus has not been on the business community and the elites. And bluntly – I mean, my predecessor certainly focused that way and many mayors have. And I think that’s, unfortunately – I think this is a profound problem. And I am tempted to borrow a quote from Karl Marx here when he says…that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie.

If you didn’t continue reading the interview transcript, you’d think that de Blasio was what the Post described, an unreconstructed radical. To support that case, they cited three “business leaders” who found him uncooperative. Of course, you can find the top ranks of the police force blaming his “leniency” for a spike in homicides even though he has bent over backwards to placate them. Indeed, at the beginning of Lehrer’s interview, you’ll note that he cites an article  charging the mayor with being a tool of the real criminal element in the city: the police force. It is the NY Times, a respectable bourgeois newspaper as opposed to Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid joke, that has been holding De Blasio’s feet to the fire for giving the cops free rein.

Immediately after invoking Karl Marx, de Blasio turns around and says that he disagrees with him, something you’d never realize from the Post article:

…I actually read that when I was a young person, I said, well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. The business community matters. We need to work with the business community. We will work with the business community, but the City government represents the people, represents working people and, you know, mayors should not be too cozy with the business community. Governors should not be too cozy with the business community. Respect them, listen to them, sometimes they have great ideas, sometimes they offer real help. There are more and more people in the business community, to be fair, who are seeing the problems and the inequalities, and actually are starting to speak up about it more. But I want them to act.

When de Blasio talks out of both sides of his mouth like this, he is using what George Orwell called doublethink in “1984”, the act of putting forward two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. Despite all his flaws, Orwell correctly singled out Stalin as a master of doublethink as evidenced in this quote from one of his speeches:

We are for the withering away of the state, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship, which represents the most powerful and mighty of all forms of the state which have existed up to the present day. The highest development of the power of the state, with the object of preparing the conditions of the withering away of the state: that is the Marxist formula. Is it “contradictory”? Yes, it is “contradictory.” But this contradiction is a living thing and wholly reflects the Marxist dialectic.

Keep in mind that despite his reputation of being an anti-Communist, Orwell’s “1984” was just as much an attack on the false consciousness promoted in the West. Bourgeois politicians are masters of this kind of doublethinking, including Bill de Blasio.

When de Blasio says he wants the capitalists to act, what is that supposed to mean? To act against their own class interests? To continue with his doublethinking exercise, de Blasio refers to Rutger Bregman’s challenge to the rich bastards at Davos a couple of years ago, but without mentioning his name:

There was a New York Times article about Davos a few years ago. It was very telling and they said, you know, everyone was talking about the income inequality at Davos and they were all wringing their hands. But then when speakers got up and said, okay, so you need to raise wages and allow unionization of your companies, or you need to raise taxes on the wealthy, those ideas were immediately dismissed. And that’s been my experience. I’ve met with business leaders from day one, and I do have – some folks I’ve really found some good common ground with, and they really want to help New York City. But a lot of folks have just sort of hit a wall when I say, guys, you’re going to have to pay more in taxes, and we’re going to have policies that favor working people more like rent freezes, which we’ve done now multiple times, and things that really have to shake the foundations of our inequality.

In his pathetic run for president last year, de Blasio made raising taxes on the wealthy a cornerstone of his campaign, just as Sanders made Medicare for All. Understanding that he had zero chance of winning the primary, he raised such a populist profile in order to recapture some of the support he once enjoyed as mayor by breaking with the pattern of pro-corporate administrations going back for decades, both Democrat and Republican.

One major Democratic Party politician took issue with such a tax-raising measure, namely Governor Andrew Cuomo who has feuded with the mayor ever since he got elected. If de Blasio got elected by pretending to be on the left, Cuomo never fostered such illusions. Most New Yorkers understand that he is on the side of the rich but likely vote for him in the absence of a serious challenger. Just the other day, there were protests at mansions out in the Hamptons by pitchfork-wielding activists. They demanded that taxes be raised on the rich in defiance of the governor as Business Insider reported:

The economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus crisis has strengthened calls for a wealth tax, especially in New York, where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex has proposed a special state tax on the ultrawealthy. The proposal has the support of at least 83 ultrawealthy people, including Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Jerry Greenfield and Disney heiress Abigail Disney, who penned an open letter arguing that such a tax would “ensure we adequately fund our health systems, schools, and security … immediately. Substantially. Permanently.”

Cuomo shot down the idea, saying that it would drive New York’s 118 billionaires out of state. At the same time, the governor announced cuts to state funding for schools, public housing, and hospitals amid a budget crisis brought on by the coronavirus crisis, sparking protests. Thursday’s march was the second protest in the Hamptons featuring pitchforks this month. The pitchforks used in the July 1 event were plastic ones purchased from a Halloween store, Patch reported at the time.

I first ran into Bill de Blasio back in 1989 when he was an aide to Mayor David Dinkins. Fresh back from a volunteer project in Nicaragua, de Blasio used to come to Nicaragua Network meetings in New York where he tried to be helpful. Not long after I wrote a “dossier” on de Blasio in 2013 during his first mayoral run, I was contacted by a NY Times reporter who was trying to red-bait him but with more sophistication than the NY Post. I referred him to some people that I used to work with in my activist days, seeing no reason why anybody would want to hide being a supporter of a revolution made on behalf of the poor. They helped him recreate the Bill de Blasio of the good old days as the NY Times’s Javier Hernandez reported:

Mr. de Blasio’s answering machine greetings in those days seemed to reflect a search for meaning. Every few weeks, he recorded a new message, incorporating a quote to reflect his mood — a passage from classic literature, lyrics from a song or stanzas of a poem.

Over time, he became more focused on his city job, and using the tools of government to effect change. The answering machine messages stopped changing. He no longer attended meetings about Nicaragua.

His friends in the solidarity movement were puzzled. At a meeting early in 1992, Mr. de Blasio was marked absent. A member scribbled a note next to his name: “Must be running for office.”

In office, de Blasio never wavered from serving the interests of the city’s powerful real estate interests. His rezoning legislation allowed the process of gentrification to proceed but even more effectively. Samuel Stein, the author of “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State” and a city planning expert, nailed de Blasio in a Jacobin article titled “De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan”. The subtitle hints at his doublethinking tactics: “By embracing inclusionary zoning, Mayor de Blasio gets to put forth a big, bold plan for reducing inequalities without challenging capitalists.” In a nutshell, inclusionary zoning allows real estate developers to get tax credits if they set aside 20 percent of a new building for working-class tenants. Michael Bloomberg pushed for this as Mayor and de Blasio did nothing except follow in his footsteps. Stein writes:

Inclusionary zoning is a fatally flawed program. It’s not just that it doesn’t produce enough units, or that the apartments it creates aren’t affordable, though both observations are undeniably true. The real problem with inclusionary zoning is that it marshals a multitude of rich people into places that are already experiencing gentrification. The result is a few new cheap apartments in neighborhoods that are suddenly and completely transformed.

de Blasio wants to use inclusionary zoning to create sixteen thousand apartments for families making $42,000. That’s just 3 percent of the need for such apartments in the city today, according to the plan’s own figures. At the same time, the mayor’s policies would build one hundred thousand more market-rate apartments in the same neighborhoods. What will happen when these rich people arrive? Rents in the surrounding area will rise; neighborhood stores will close; more working-class people will be displaced by gentrification than will be housed in the new inclusionary complexes.

Tom Angotti, the director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development, argues that inclusionary zoning’s proponents “deal with housing as if it existed in a free market — as if it were just a matter of individual apartments combined. But it exists in a land market, where values are determined largely by location and zoning capacity. In areas with high land values, the new inclusionary development will just feed the fire of gentrification.”

I met Tom Angotti at a Left Forum 4 years ago or so and raised the possibility of him doing a video with me about rezoning. I never followed up because my plate was filled. I do have a copy of his “Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, And City Planning In New York City” and recommend it highly.

Unlike most of the liberal-left, I had no illusions that de Blasio would rock the boat. In a CounterPunch article dated September 25, 2013, I projected what his administration would be up to:

As de Blasio escalated up the electoral ramps in New York, he was careful to retain his liberal coloration even though he became an ally of Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn pol who once belonged to Meir Kahane’s terrorist Jewish Defense League.

When Hikind spearheaded a drive to force Brooklyn College to add a speaker reflecting Zionist policies to a meeting on BDS, de Blasio issued the following statement: “The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is inflammatory, dangerous and utterly out of step with the values of New Yorkers. An economic boycott represents a direct threat to the State of Israel–that’s something we need to oppose in all its forms. No one seriously interested in bringing peace, security and tolerance to the Middle East should be taken in by this event.”

Despite his anti-landlord rhetoric, he also endorsed Bruce Ratner’s downtown Brooklyn megaproject that ran roughshod over the local community’s needs. Originally based on a design by superstar architect Frank Gehry, the project so appalled novelist and Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem that he was inspired to write an open letter to Gehry calling the project “a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives.”

There’s lots of excitement among liberals about the prospects of a de Blasio mayoralty. As might have been expected, the Nation Magazine endorsed him in the primary election as “reimagining the city in boldly progressive, egalitarian terms.” Peter Beinart, a New Republic editor who has gained some attention lately for veering slightly from the Zionist consensus, wrote an article for The Daily Beast titled “The Rise of the New New Left” that was even more breathless than the Nation editorial. Alluding to German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s theory of “political generations”, Beinart sees the de Blasio campaign as “an Occupy-inspired challenge to Clintonism.”

Most of Beinart’s article takes up the question of whether de Blasio’s momentum could unleash broader forces that would derail Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016. Perhaps that analysis can only be supported if you ignore the fact that de Blasio was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager when she ran for senator from New York in 2000. The NY Times reported on October 7, 2000: “At the White House, the president, Mrs. Clinton and her campaign team can often be found in the Map Room or the Family Theater, drilling for her debates, or fine-tuning lines in some speech.” One surmises that Bill de Blasio was there.

Ultimately, what will create affordable housing and higher taxes on the rich is the kind of protests that took place out in the Hamptons. The rich have no worries about a Mayor de Blasio or even a President Bernie Sanders. As long as the capitalist state exists as the superstructure over capitalist property relations, the ruling class will have its way. Today, as at no point in American history since the 1930s, capitalist society is facing its deepest crisis. The liberal-left that backed Bill De Blasio, Bernie Sanders, and every other doublethinking politician is doing the best it can to steer people into futile DP election campaigns. The only thing that will work is a massive movement of the working-class and its allies against the two-party system that culminates in a new kind of state that governs on behalf of them rather than the rich. If de Blasio can quote the Communist Manifesto, so can we but without the doublethink:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

August 3, 2020

Shanghai Triad

Filed under: China,Film — louisproyect @ 8:30 pm

Tomorrow, a digitally restored version of the 1995 “Shanghai Triad” will be available on Virtual Cinema. For a $10 rental, you get a chance to see a film directed by Zhang Yimou, widely regarded as China’s greatest director.

Set in Shanghai in 1930 and within the triad milieu (drug gangs originating in the Boxer Rebellion), this is not the same genre that Hong Kong studios routinely churned out in the 60s and 70s. Instead, the two primary characters have only a tangential relation to the  gangsters, who are mostly secondary. One is a 14-year old boy named Shuisheng, whose uncle has brought to Shanghai for a job with the Tang clan. Unlike most mafia movies, the boy is not being trained to be a hitman. Instead, he is a servant to the boss’s mistress Bijou, who treats him like dirt. The gang’s godfather is a Tang, just like Shuisheng and his uncle. Like the Sicilian mafia, family ties go a long way in guaranteeing loyalty.

Throughout the film, Shuisheng is a passive observer of the chaos all about him. Bijou is not only abusive toward him, she also is in the habit of telling off boss Tang, a man in his sixties who does on the beautiful but churlish young woman, who is played by Gong Li—generally regarded as China’s greatest actress.

On his first day of work serving Bijou, Shuisheng makes the mistake of bringing tea and cakes into her bedroom without knocking first. She snarls at his lack of servant skills. She orders him to go out again and start over. He must knock first, and, while he is at it, announce himself as Shuisheng the bumpkin. Bijou is a nightmarish diva who performs as a songstress in boss Tang’s nightclub. If you’re familiar with Zhang Yimou’s body of work, you’ll know that he is a sucker for spectacle. Except for “Not One Less”, a great film about a young schoolteacher in China’s hinterland, his films are feasts for the eyes and ears. When Bijou performs, it is like being treated to a Chinese version of a Busby Berkeley musical.

Toward the middle of the film, boss Tang begins to play a bigger role after a rival gang launches a bloody raid on his estate that results in the death of Shuisheng’s uncle and others in his retinue. In keeping with Zhang’s overall approach, we don’t even see the rival gangs in combat. His interest is mostly in the tangled relationship between the boss and his mistress, and hers with the young and mostly passive servant who speaks no more than 25 words in the entire film. His acting skills are displayed entirely through his facial expressions.

After the raid, Tang takes Bijou, Shuisheng and a small detachment of his lieutenants to a remote island with zero amenities. Upon their arrival, Bijou begins to complain bitterly about being bored. Perhaps being tired of the gangster life, she begins to spend more time with Shuisheng, and a widowed mother and her young daughter, the sole inhabitants of the island. They live primitive but satisfying lives unlike the murderous gangsters who interfere with their peaceful conditions like Edward G. Robinson’s gang in “Key Largo”. We soon learn that Bijou was once a bumpkin like them, as the ties between them grow. She tells Shuisheng that once they return to Shanghai, he has to break with the gang and return to the countryside or else he will end up with his uncle.

The climax of the film consists once again of a showdown between the two gangs seen earlier but also, once again, sans pyrotechnics. Zhang’s main interest is in showing how the brutal, feudal-like society of Chinese triads make those at the bottom of the chain vulnerable. Unlike the Hong Kong actions films of the 60s and 70s, as great as they were, “Shanghai Triad” leaves you with the conclusion that wiping them out was one of the great gains of the revolution made by Mao Zedong.

In the press notes, Zhang is asked “What’s at stake in this film? Is the film a warning to the Chinese people with regard to their increasingly materialistic lifestyle?” His reply:

Absolutely. This story is the first time I have depicted a life of luxury and material wealth. In effect, I just wanted to say to my countrymen and to others that there is something more important than power and mere material possessions. What counts most in life is man’s capacity for love and generosity. That is why I did not want to make a traditional Mafia film. To my mind, this film speaks up for important issues.

August 2, 2020

Justice denied to Michael Brown once again

Filed under: Black Lives Matter — louisproyect @ 8:17 pm

Michael Brown Jr.

This week St. Louis’s top prosecutor Wesley Bell, an African-American, announced that no new charges would be brought against Darren Wilson, the cop who fired six bullets into an unarmed teen named Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. His killing triggered protests that helped to establish Black Lives Matter as the key organizer against racist cops.

On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice absolved Wilson of all crimes in a memorandum that was embraced by both the Democratic and Republican Party’s media outlets. While Fox News was predictably jubilant, Jonathan Capehart, a Washington Post reporter who received a prize for his Black rights advocacy, penned an article titled “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie.” The title speaks for itself.

The failure of the Democratic Party media outlets to question the report is easily explicable by its blind loyalty to Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president and his attorney general Eric Holder, the first African-American to hold that office in American history. To give the impression of impartiality, Holder also issued a blistering report on how the cops abused Blacks in Ferguson for many years. That report should have been titled “Dog Bites Man”.

On April 27, 2018, I reviewed a documentary titled “Stranger Fruit” for CounterPunch that pretty much treated Michael Brown as an innocent, even to the point of absolving him of the petty theft of some cigarillos from a convenience store. I still recommend the film even though it goes overboard in trying to make Brown far more the victim than the facts would support. It’s main strength is in debunking Darren Wilson’s firing six bullets into Brown as an act of self-defense.

Jason Pollock made his film before the DOJ report was released. In sitting down to write this article, I was curious to see how he would react to it since it contradicted his own findings. In an interview with Daily Kos, he made an interesting point. In responding to the meme that was conveyed in the title of Capehart’s article, he stated, “All the DOJ said.. was they could not determine [the angle of Brown’s arms].  People didn’t read the report, they just didn’t read it.” In fact, he was right. Frank Vyan Walton, the interviewer, took a close look and included an excerpt that jibed with Pollock’s point:

Given the mobility of the arm, it is impossible to determine the position of the body relative to the shooter at the time the arm wounds were inflicted. Therefore, the autopsy results do not indicate whether Brown was facing Wilson or had his back to him. They do not indicate whether Brown sustained those two arm wounds while his hands were up, down, or by his waistband. The private forensic pathologist opined that he would expect a re-entry wound across Brown’s stomach if Brown’s hand was at his waistband at the time Wilson fired. However, as mentioned, there is no way to know the exact position of Brown’s arm relative to his waistband at the time the bullets struck. Therefore, these gunshot wounds neither corroborate nor discredit Wilson’s account or the account of any other witness. However, the concentration of bullet wounds on Brown’s right side is consistent with Wilson’s description that he focused on Brown’s right arm while shooting.

In my own close reading of the DOJ report, I was struck by other inconsistencies. 86 pages long, the report is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 evaluates the physical and forensic evidence. Part 2—the bulk of the report—recapitulates the testimony of the various eyewitnesses, nearly all of whom backed up the cop’s version of what took place, except for his friend Dorian Johnson, who was walking alongside him that day and who is featured prominently in Pollock’s film, and a white contractor with no vested interest in the incident. Part 3 is the summary.

In the brief summary at the end of the report, this excerpt will give you the impression that Dorian was ready to give up his friend:

Witnesses 102, 103, 104, and Wilson and concluded that Brown did in fact reach for and attempt to grab Wilson’s gun, that Brown could have overpowered Wilson, which was acknowledged even by Witness 101 [Dorian Johnson], and that Wilson fired his weapon just over his own lap in an attempt to regain control of a dangerous situation.

Acknowledged by witness 101? If you go to page 44 of the report, you’ll only see that Johnson described Brown as having the “upper hand” in the confrontation. Given that Wilson had a gun, it seems far-fetched to think that the cop could not have prevailed. Johnson does say that Wilson would have to be “superhuman” to “overpower” Brown but that’s a reference to something resembling an arm-wrestling match. When Wilson shoots Brown in the hand, he runs away from the patrol car as fast as his legs can carry him. If he was “superhuman”, the bullets would have bounced off his hand. Right?

As for Witness number two, I got a chuckle out of why he decided to turn up at the police department to finger Brown as someone deserving to be shot six times:

Witness 102 explained that he came forward because he “felt bad about the situation,” and he wanted to “bring closure to [Brown’s] family,” so they would not think that the officer “got away with murdering their son.” He further explained that “most people think that police are bad for ‘em up until the time they’re in need of the police,” and he felt that witnesses would not come forward to tell the truth in this case because of community pressure.

He wanted to console the family while justifying the killer cop’s deeds? His notion that most people think that the police are bad makes me scratch my head. Wasn’t it obvious what had been going on Ferguson for decades?

For me, the hardest part to swallow was the excuse made for Darren Wilson firing six bullets into Michael Brown:

According to Wilson, Brown balled or clenched his fists and “charged” forward, ignoring commands to stop. Knowing that Brown was much larger than him and that he had previously attempted to overpower him and take his gun, Wilson stated that he feared for his safety and fired at Brown. Again, even Witness 101’s account supports this perception. Brown then reached toward his waistband, causing Wilson to fear that Brown was reaching for a weapon.

Once again, there is nothing in the recap of Dorian Johnson’s testimony that supports the cop’s claim. The report states, “Witness 101 was steadfast that Brown fell to the ground right where he initially stopped and turned around. At most, Brown took a half-step forward, but he did not move toward Wilson. Witness 101 was also steadfast that Brown never put his hand(s) near his waist.”

As for this business about reaching toward his waistband, just think about it. If Michael Brown had a gun and was such a desperado, why would he have run away? Wouldn’t he have pulled out the gun much sooner and put a bullet in the cop? Anybody who has been following these de facto lynchings knows that this is often used as an excuse. It is called the “fear defense”. All you need to do is state that a “perp” was reaching for a gun and then you can shoot him or her in cold blood. Sometimes, you can even plant a gun on the dead “bad guy” just to make sure you are cleared.

In 2016, Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote an article for The New Yorker titled “Police Shootings, Race, and the Fear Defense” that makes clear how Darren Wilson would play this card:

The shooters’ protestations of fear have in some cases seemed cynical and absurd, because of the imbalance in power between the cops (armed, able to summon support, the arm of the law) and their victims, and because the suggestions that their victims were scary and impossible to control have tended to draw on the basest racial fears, and to be expressed in the crudest language. “When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” the Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson said, of the man he killed, Michael Brown. Brown was six feet four and two hundred and ninety pounds, and Wilson is six feet four and two hundred and ten pounds. “Hulk Hogan. That’s how big he felt and how small I felt just grasping his arm.”

Finally, the Department of Justice did not take the word of Witness 122 seriously, a contractor who, unlike Dorian Johnson, had little reason to make things up. If you look at the DOJ report, you will find the suppression of this witness’s testimony troubling:

Witness 122 is a 46-year-old white male. He was laying drain pipe on Canfield Drive with Witness 130 on the morning of the shooting. Witness 122 gave six statements, including testimony before the county grand jury. SLCPD detectives and an FBI agent twice jointly interviewed him, and SLCPD detectives once independently interviewed him. Witness 122 and Witness 130 authored one-page written statements on advice of a former boss.

Witness 122 also claimed that Brown put his right hand to the ground to regain his balance when he was hit and as he turned around. According to both contractors, Brown then turned around with his hands up and repeatedly screamed “Okay!” as many as eight times, an exclamation heard by no other witness. When Witness 122 demonstrated the position of Brown’s hands for federal prosecutors and agents, he wavered from a position of surrender to one indicative of a person trying to maintain balance.

According to the Brown family, Witness 122 called them after the shooting and told them that he had seen Wilson shoot Brown execution-style as Brown was on his knees holding his hands in the air. However, Witness 122 denied making any statements about the nature of the shooting to the Brown family. As mentioned, despite his earlier statements, Witness 122 recanted the claim that he actually saw Brown fall dead to the ground. Witness 122 has no criminal history. As detailed above, material portions of Witness 122’s accounts are irreconcilable with the physical and forensic evidence. These accounts are also inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with credible witness accounts. Accordingly, after a thorough review of all of the evidence, federal prosecutors determined this witness’s accounts not to be credible and therefore do not support a prosecution of Darren Wilson. The person who recorded this video claimed that yet another person, “Chris,” made that statement.

So, the DOJ discounted the testimony of this white contractor while relying on that of someone who said, “most people think that police are bad for ‘em up until the time they’re in need of the police.” Clearly, the fix was in.

July 31, 2020

Queens Noir

Filed under: Counterpunch,literature — louisproyect @ 2:59 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, JULY 31, 2020

As a long-time fan of Nordic Noir detective stories, I never expected to see a home-grown version. You might call Michael Elias’s “You Can Go Home Now” Queens Noir since it is set mostly in that dreary stretch of two-story houses and strip malls that will be familiar to anybody who has left Manhattan on their way to the airport. I confess never having stepped foot in this wasteland and only know it as the place that Archie Bunker personified in the 1960s and 70s. I even wonder if Elias knows this area except as a background for his breakthrough novel. To render it accurately might have taken the same kind of dedication that would go into a story about a serial killer in the French Riviera, except with a lot less opportunity to savor local restaurants. For some of the characters in “You Can Go Home Now”, McDonald’s is a night on the town.

Written in the first person singular, “You Can Go Home Now” tells the story of Nina Karim, a cop working in the Long Island City police department. Like just about every cop featured in a Nordic Noir novel or a TV series based on one, Karim is not typical. She reads the refined short stories of V.S. Pritchett rather than the pulp fiction of V.C. Andrews that is ubiquitous to airport bookstores. After Andrews died, a novelist named Andrew Neiderman became her ghostwriter and a very successful one at that. I should add that Neiderman and Elias were a few classes ahead of mine in Fallsburg Central High school in upstate New York.

Continue reading

July 29, 2020

The Shadow of Violence

Filed under: Film — louisproyect @ 6:36 pm

Opening on Friday, July 31, “The Shadow of Violence” is noteworthy both as a film and as a turning-point in cinema since it will be the first film I’ve reviewed since March 13th that is opening in physical theaters rather than as VOD, or what they call “virtual cinema” (venues listed below).

Based on Joe Murtagh’s adaptation of Irish author Colin Barrett’s “Young Skins,” first-time director Nick Rowland has made a somber film about the plight of Douglas “Arm” Armstrong, an enforcer for an Irish drug gang based in the western Irish countryside. From the beginning of the film, you expect things to end predictably on a tragic note but stay tuned in to Arm out of compassion for a man trying to break the chains fate has cast.

Acclaimed as an amateur boxer, Arm found it hard to resist going on the payroll of the Devers brothers. For doing nothing much except beating people up, he had job security and enough money to live on. Unlike Italy, the USA, Mexico or Colombia, the drug trade in rural Ireland will not make you rich. The two kingpins of the Devers family might be better labeled as pawnpins with their ratty clothes and shabby homes. Whatever they lack in wealth, they more than make up for in viciousness.

Early on in the film, Arm and his partner Dympna, a nephew to the Devers, are dispatched to punish an old man who came to a party they threw. When there, he supposedly raped a young female guest. With what appears to be a total absence of police in the town, punishment is dealt out as if it were the Old West and like in the Old West, men, especially rustlers, get lynched.

Arm has little trouble beating the living daylights out of the old man but is dismayed to discover that the Devers brothers view that as only the prelude. They order Arm to kill him, specifically by throwing him over a cliff. Arm might be capable of beating someone up (although he seems to get no pleasure out of it) but he has never killed anybody before, except in an amateur fight. He felt terrible remorse over a ring accident, so much so that he never went pro. With that trauma in his past, he was not up to the task of killing someone in cold blood. Of course, the consequence of defying his bosses’ orders could be fatal.

If he didn’t have enough on his hands dealing with the Devers, he is in one skirmish after another with his ex-girlfriend Ursula and their autistic son. Arm loves the boy but has trouble getting through to him. When we see him lose patience with the child, we chalk that up as a moral deficit but at least give him credit for wanting to be part of his life. Since Ursula would rather see him disappear because of his job as a drug gang’s enforcer, he has to work extra hard to get time with his son.

Arm is played by Cosmo Jarvis, a brawny British actor who has the same handsome but menacing features as Dwayne Johnson. For most of the film, he is impassive.  In hot water with his bosses over his failure to carry out a hit and his ex-girlfriend for his low-life ways, his anguish becomes hard to mask. Nick Rowland does an excellent job drawing out top-rate performances from his actors. In the director’s notes, he states:

The world of THE SHADOW OF VIOLENCE is energetic, eccentric and beautiful as much as it is dark and threatening. It is a place where violence or laughter could erupt at any moment. I loved how the audience are propelled forward by the youthful energy and spirit of the central characters. Above all else, I wanted to take the audience on a deeply emotional journey, as we explore this brutal world through the eyes of our deeply vulnerable protagonist, as he grapples with his conscience and desire to do what is best for his son.

I’d say he has succeeded admirably.

“The Shadow of Violence” can be seen in the following venues:

CITY   THEATER

Sarasota: Burns Court

KC: Screenland Armour

Chicago:
The Promenade at Bollingbrook
The Arboretum of South Barrington
Emagine Frankfort

Houston:
Ipic Theatres River Oaks District
Star Cinema Grill Baybrook
Star Cinema Grill Springwoods
Star Cinema Grill Richmond
Star Cinema Grill Cypress

Dallas  The Village at Fairview

Austin:
The Domain Austin
Lake Creek 7

Oklahoma City: Rodeo Cinema

Winchester VA: Alamo Winchester

Minneapolis:
Emagine Eagan 15
Emagine White Bear 17
Emagine Willow Creek 12

Fayettville AK: Razorback 16

Owensboro KY: Owensboro Cinema Grill

Southhaven MS: De Soto Cinema Grill

Ft Collins CO: Lyric Cinema

Salt Lake City:
Megaplex at The Gateway
Megaplex 18 at Thanksgiving Point
Megaplex at Jordan Commons

Ogden UT: Megaplex 13 at The Junction

July 28, 2020

Chapo Trap House and Matt Taibbi crack down on the antiracists

Filed under: Harper's Open Letter — louisproyect @ 9:00 pm

Chapo Trap House, from left: Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Amber A’Lee Frost, Virgil Texas and Will Menaker.

The deeper I dig into the controversy provoked by the Harper’s Open Letter, the more convinced I am that it reflects a faultline on the American left. First and foremost, it involves race and class with people such as Thomas Chatterton Williams and Matt Taibbi, two of the leading figures leading the charge against “cancel culture”, contending that Black “identity politics” has become an infection almost as deadly as COVID-19.

There are perhaps two degrees of separation between these two high-profile pundits and the campaign waged by Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson and Walter Benn Michaels against “antiracism”.

And another two degrees separates them and their frequent interventions on Jacobin and Nonsite from Project 1619, which Reed and some blue-chip historians regard as an insidious propaganda campaign that has the audacity to claim, for example, that Abraham Lincoln was a racist. When Boston decided to remove a statue depicting Abraham Lincoln with a freed black man at his feet, this just became the latest example of cancel culture’s threat to both art and our historical legacy.

Within this boiling cauldron of charges and counter-charges, Jacobin, the DSA and the Sandernista left are at the center, just like the eye of a hurricane. This became obvious to me after listening to their fellow-traveler Chapo Trap House’s podcast number 435, titled “Let’s Get Cancelled”. Made on July 9th, just two days after the Harper’s Open Letter appeared, it featured two Chapo members, Will Menaker and Amber A’Lee Frost, interviewing Matt Taibbi. Like all such podcasts, there is uniformity of opinion to the point of becoming so tedious that you can barely stay awake. For people on such a high horse about the need for free and open debate, you’d think that they’d do a podcast with a range of opinion.

Not only was there an affinity between the three over politics, there was also an affinity over their preening self-image of themselves as fearless and funny social commentators. Like eXile, the Russian magazine where Taibbi wrote many “satirical” articles joking about rape and humiliating women, Chapo Trap House has exploited its left-liberalism and “shock jock” sensibility to make money. Raking in $115,000 a month, their podcasts allow the Sandernista left to enjoy takedowns of people high and low. Hillary Clinton at the top and gays at the bottom are both grist for their mill as this song illustrates:

I am gay and I voted for Obama
I am a shill for the Clinton campaign and the leftwing mainstream press
I’m a pussy who gets fucked right up the ass
I am a cuck
I am a libtard
I am a fag who was blessed to live amongst us
And Arabs to have equal rights.
I have no love of country and the white folks are not all bad
And the Albright folks are tacky
It makes me sad

There’s no need to get offended by this since it is only “satire”, just like the eXile. If you do get offended, then you are one of those snowflakes turning the USA into a totalitarian society where Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” will be required reading just as Mao Zedong’s Red Book was in China. Get caught disagreeing openly with DiAngelo will lead to you being incarcerated for many years. Think I am kidding? Matt Taibbi said that DiAngelo’s philosophy is “Hitlerian”.

Sixteen minutes into the podcast, the subject of Project 1619 came up. In Taibbi’s view, this was an attempt by the NY Times to demonize Donald Trump after Russiagate had fallen flat on its face. He described it as something that never would have made it into the Times if Clinton had been elected. Taibbi was appalled by the idea that anybody would have the gumption to refer to the USA as a white supremacist project. Yeah, they killed the Indians and enslaved Africans but it also produced the Bill of Rights and coca-cola. With Trump in the White House, it became necessary to depict the USA as essentially racist so they printed a bunch of lies in the NY Times, presumably like in the article “Sugar” by Khalil Gibran Muhammad that stated:

The trade was so lucrative that Wall Street’s most impressive buildings were Trinity Church at one end, facing the Hudson River, and the five-story sugar warehouses on the other, close to the East River and near the busy slave market. New York’s enslaved population reached 20 percent, prompting the New York General Assembly in 1730 to issue a consolidated slave code, making it “unlawful for above three slaves” to meet on their own, and authorizing “each town” to employ “a common whipper for their slaves.”

Yeah, the nerve of the NY Times to cancel Trinity Church. What’s next? St. Patrick’s Cathedral?

Menaker and Frost agreed completely with this analysis, with Frost characterizing it as being supported by “annoying” and “ridiculous” people. Like Adolph Reed Jr., she found herself in total agreement with the long-in-the-tooth professor emeriti who were interviewed on WSWS and saw this country as committed to freedom and democracy, at least on paper.

This pile of crap assumes that the Black reporters at the NY Times were in on this conspiracy to demonize Donald Trump and that it required the publisher’s green light to make it possible. Chapo and Taibbi just don’t get it. Over the past decade, the newsrooms have become more reflective of the diversity of American society. Given their social weight, they are likely to raise a fuss over the lack of representation both in promotions and in what is reported. Yes, someone like Walter Benn Michaels would regard their demands for more representation as just another example of petty-bourgeois indifference to class issues but don’t they have a right to ask for an explanation why Tom Cotton’s racist op-ed piece could have shown up, with its call for shooting down BLM protesters? Taibbi weighed in on this, calling James Bennet’s departure as another example of cancel culture’s totalitarian tendencies.

After denouncing Project 1619, the three compadres next voiced their disgust with how protesters were for abolishing the police and prisons, with calls like “kill the cops” at protests showing how out of touch they were with Americans. Like Reed and Johnson, they referred to African-Americans demanding police protection and described defunding the police as a knuckle-headed demand of the left academy and ultra-leftist rioters. Taibbi felt that he was on solid ground making such points since he had written a highly-regarded book about how the cops killed Eric Garner on Staten Island. Yes, it was a good book but it doesn’t compensate for Taibbi’s more recent forays into law and order apologetics. He told Menaker and Frost that the problem was “bad eggs”, not institutional racism. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten the word that the police didn’t exist in the USA until a need arose for rounding up runaway slaves.

For his part Menaker rued the call for abolishing the police since it distracted attention away from a really popular demand like Medicare for All. Perhaps, abolishing the police became a popular demand when the video of George Floyd having a knee on his neck for 8 minutes made the population rethink the role of the cops. This was not your father’s “Miami Vice” or “NYPD Blue” after all.

You might describe Chapo Trap House as Dustin Giustella politics + Don Imus jokes. Like Joe Rogan, it has a distinctly anti-establishment flavor but without any serious consideration of the deeper realities of capitalist society. Taibbi, Rogan and Jacobin pinned all their hopes on a Bernie Sanders presidency and when it failed to materialize, they looked for a scapegoat. Sanders’s failure to win Black voters to his cause was blamed on Hillary Clinton’s exploitation of identity politics rather than his own class-reductionism that continues to this day. Like Taibbi and company, he is for professionalizing the police department, not abolishing it.

As for demands to abolish (or defund) the police and prisons, they certainly push the envelope and have a certain susceptibility to being dismissed as impractical. You might as well dismiss the idea of socialism while you are at it, for that matter. In the 1960s, the SWP used to raise the slogan of Black Control of the Black Community. There was no real chance of that happening as long as capitalism was in firm control of the country but given a certain level of instability, it might begin to seem reasonable. Fifty years ago we overestimated the mood of the country. Given the fact that the BLM protests are the largest in American history, it is high time to think big—ie., revolutionary.

Despite the title of the podcast, the three don’t really get into it until close to the end, at 47:00. Like Harper’s, they aren’t very specific. They talk about all the people being intimidated by the political correctness mob but who exactly has been fired or silenced by hostile tweets from the left?

As mentioned above, they offer up Sanders as someone who was cancelled but there is zero acknowledgement of his own gaffes, which included a failure to go for the jugular in his debates with Biden. In any case, presidential campaigns are nasty business and there’s little evidence that anything Clinton said in 2016 that could be legitimately be described as cancel culture. The Clintons played dirty in every campaign they ever ran. Although I never had any intention of voting for Sanders, I would have like to see him confront Biden over his bromance with Senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. It was left to Corey Booker and Kamala Harris to put Biden on the spot. However, the Washington Post anticipated where Sanders was heading with such charges in a June 20, 2019 article:

In recent weeks Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as well as several lower-polling candidates, have begun criticizing Biden’s track record and campaign messaging. But for the most part, those critiques have been broad and theoretical, without mentioning Biden by name.

Without mentioning Biden by name? Don’t blame cancel culture for Sanders’s miserable showing in the Black community. Like Biden’s friendship with the southern racists, Sanders’s friendship with Biden compromised him. It’s too bad that Sandernista chumps like the Chapistas and Taibbi don’t get it.

Taibbi did come up with a couple of cancel culture incidents that might have qualified as censorious unless you dig beneath the surface. He alluded to the tragic suicide of a Dartmouth administrator named David Bucci who had “nothing to do with anything” but was driven to this desperate act by the typical politically correct mobs on campus. According to Taibbi, some “weird sex scandal” took place in his department. He initially “tried to help” the people who came forward with sexual harassment complaints, but after Dartmouth included him as a plaintiff, he ended up killing himself. Like Taibbi’s support for Evergreen State College’s Bret Weinstein, this is decidedly one-sided. The NY Times reported:

But to the women, Dr. Bucci was a central part of a system that enabled abuse and harassment. He was named 31 times in the 72-page legal complaint, which said that after receiving the initial grievance, the college had been slow to protect the women from further abuse, and that Dr. Bucci had called a department meeting where he browbeat the women who were planning to sue.

The 72-page legal complaint included this finding:

Jane Doe [the unnamed plaintiff] told Chair Bucci [current Chair of Psychology David Bucci] that the culture and harassment perpetuated by the Department’s professors and the poor fit with the lab she had been assigned had left her without a safe scientific home to complete her work. Chair Bucci trivialized Jane Doe’s experiences of harassment and displacement by comparing them with a time when he was inundated with administrative work, stating “I had a hellish year, too, but was able to do my work.”

In fact, there is evidence that the young women who came forward with their complaint suffered cancel culture as well, as an op-ed by two female Dartmouth professors indicated:

The Times article cites friends and family members who see Bucci as “a casualty of a scorched-earth legal strategy to pin blame on the Ivy League college.” But sadly, his heartbreaking death is not the only tragedy that followed in the wake of these events. Several of the plaintiffs became suicidal. Their careers were thrown off track. They were disparaged, threatened and discouraged from speaking out. They were “slut-shamed” by Dartmouth College’s response to the lawsuit, which can be seen as a scorched-earth legal strategy to pin the blame on 17- to 23-year-old female students groomed for abuse by professors who were supposed to mentor them.

Finally, Taibbi drops the name of Canadian novelist Hal Niedzviecki who was forced to resign as editor of a the journal Write after endorsing the idea of cultural appropriation in a special issue featuring indigenous authors. In his editor’s introduction, he wrote: “In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities” and advised writers to try to “Win the Appropriation Prize”. If you knew nothing about indigenous culture in Canada, this might sound reasonable. After all, as Taibbi points out, writers have an obligation to travel outside their comfort zone, even if this lesson would be lost on the people cozying up to each other on these various podcasts.

For a different take on Niedzviecki being “canceled”, I recommend this astute Vice article. It gets to the heart of the Harper’s Open Letter’s Pecksniffian posturing and Taibbi’s nonstop dismissal of Black attempts to gain equality with those born with a white skin [emphases added]:

Like all media controversies, this could have ended pretty quickly. While TWUC [The Writer’s Union of Canada that publishes Write] released the only type of statement they could have after messing up that badly, Niedzviecki could’ve offered a lengthy and selfless public apology alongside his resignation. But it didn’t take long for white Canadian writers to jump to Niedzviecki’s defense. The Globe and Mail’s Elizabeth Renzetti offered the lukewarm argument of the piece being insightful—in that it created a debate. The National Post’s Christie Blatchford went full Blatch and argued that Niedzviecki was being “silenced” and that he joined the ranks of white people who’ve been bullied into apologizing (something he actually never did publicly).

But just as it almost fizzled out thanks to the vicious half-life of the news cycle, a bunch of high-ranking members of Canadian media—all white—decided to go lose their shit on Twitter.

Ken Whyte, former Senior Vice-President of Public Policy at Rogers came up with the novel idea to start the actual award proposed in Niedzviecki’s piece. He was soon joined by Maclean’s editor-in-chief Alison Uncles, and the National Post’s editor-in-chief Anne Marie Owens as well as a growing list of other members of Canadian media. What do they all have in common? They’re white and they’re as powerful as Canadian media gets. As more people dragged these tweets, a few of those who were a part of creating the “Appropriation Prize” admitted they were being stupid or “glib.”

When it comes to the world of literature and media, “controversies” like this one are expected by any person of colour. In my experience, being a writer in Canadian media means being reminded of exactly who the gatekeepers are and exactly what they think of anyone who isn’t white and powerful. It happens often, most recently with the Joseph Boyden controversy, Walrus editor Jonathan Kay took it upon himself to defend the author against Indigenous people with valid concerns over the author’s identity. Again, Kay is the editor-in-chief of a publication that positions itself as Canada’s New Yorker.

The obvious solution would be to encourage the minorities they so deeply want to see in stories to, you know, write their own stories—but clearly that’s not their priority.

The thing is, Canadian media seems to be getting more diverse. I see it myself with my colleagues and peers, increasingly I’m seeing that emerging writers who aren’t white get recognition. I see fellow women of colour get more bylines than I did three years ago when I began writing professionally. While it’s great to see at the lower rungs, I question the significance of these slow changes in who is telling what stories when those at the top are still extremely white and male. When our editors are tweeting about funding and creating prizes for white people to pretend to be us, it only shows us we matter in terms of optics.

In Niedzviecki’s piece he argues that in order to see non-white stories better represented in Canadian media, white Canadian authors need to go beyond “what they know” and write from the voices of those who aren’t like their white middle-class selves. What does it show us when the only solution these high-ranking journalists, executives and editors have is to create an award for white people who want to write stories that aren’t their own? The obvious solution would be to encourage the minorities they so deeply want to see in stories to, you know, write their own stories—but clearly that’s not their priority. Their response seemingly shows their real fear—people of colour speaking for themselves and white voices being relegated to the sidelines.

July 25, 2020

Days of the Whale

Filed under: Colombia,Film — louisproyect @ 6:33 pm

Now available as virtual cinema, “Days of the Whale” is set in Medellin, Colombia and tells the story of two young street artists contending with street gangs. Given the provenance of both factions, it is not surprising that nearly the entire film takes place on the gritty streets of a city that will always be associated with Pablo Escobar and violence.

When I was in high school, my English teacher Fred Madeo, who was just one of a number of radical-minded faculty members keeping his politics close to his vest, clued us in on “Hedda Gabler”. He said that in act one, you see a pistol being handled by Hedda Gabler. Whenever you see a pistol, a knife, etc., in act one of a play, you are primed to expect some kind of tragedy by the final act.

In “Days of the Whale”, instead of a weapon, you get a gangster warning Simón (David Escallón Orrego), one of the film’s young co-stars, that unless he pays for the “right” to do art on the city’s walls, he might get killed. His girlfriend and fellow artist Cristina (Laura Tobón Ochoa) both put up brave fronts against this threat but you cannot help but feel that they are doomed. Even though most of the film shows them happily at work in an art form that is truly proletarian, you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Despite the threat of violence, this is really much more of a love story and a very good one at that. As much as they love each other, another threat hangs over their head, namely one of being separated through no fault of their own. Cristina’s mother is an investigative reporter whose opposition to the city’s gang world has forced her to move to Spain because of threats on her life. Simón, who comes from a working-class background and who even was a gang member when younger, is torn between loving her and anger over being abandoned. To fight against both threats, they put their heart and soul into their artwork as if each day was their last.

Neither of the co-stars are professional actors. The director-writer Catalina Arroyave Restrepo decided that this would give the film authenticity and she was right. In the press notes, she said that John Cassavetes’s films were an influence. It shows. Her statement on what motivated her to make “Days of the Whale” conveys the hunger of young Colombians for a different way of living in a country degraded by almost a century of dictatorship, corruption, and criminality:

I have always been obsessed with freedom, and that took me to write a story about my discontempt [sic] with that criminal reality and the desire of rebelling against it. I started fantasizing about using the stories that my graffiti artist friends told me about their adventures in the streets, dealing with the owners of each territory, and also with using the colors, rhythm and textures of this universe to make a film. That’s how Days of the whale was conceived.

Highly recommended.

July 24, 2020

Matt Taibbi, the Harper’s Open Letter, and the Intellectual Dark Web

Filed under: Counterpunch,Harper's Open Letter,journalism — louisproyect @ 1:20 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, JULY 24, 2020

Just a day before the Harper’s Open Letter appeared on July 7th, Osita Nwanevu wrote an article for The New Republic on “The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism” that made Matt Taibbi sound as if his name would show up there the next day. Indeed, in a convivial Rolling Stone podcast that Taibbi and his partner Katie Halper did with Thomas Chatterton Williams, the godfather of the letter regretted that he didn’t have Taibbi’s email address otherwise he would have been invited.

Nwenevu’s article addressed the widespread assault on identity politics that makes it sound like the greatest threat to American democracy is diversity training seminars by Robin Diangelo, the author of “White Fragility.” Indeed, Matt Taibbi described the philosophy behind her book as positively “Hitlerian.”

This furor over “cancel culture” or what used to be called “political correctness” is not exactly new. I saw it as early as 1991 when Nat Hentoff was on the warpath against efforts to reduce racism at universities and the media, just as is happening today:

For 2 1/2 years, I have been interviewing students and professors across the country for a book I’m writing on assaults by orthodoxies — right and left — on freedom of expression. Many specific incidents of political correctness — with names — have been printed in this column from those interviews.

One very bright young man at Brown, for example, told me he finally gave up offering his questions on affirmative action — like “What has it done for poor blacks?” — in class. He got tired of being called a racist, in and out of the room.

Continue reading

July 21, 2020

Transgender people and the Harper’s Open Letter

Filed under: Black Lives Matter,Harper's Open Letter,transgender — louisproyect @ 8:43 pm

A number of critiques of the Harper’s cancel culture open letter have referred to the presence of transphobic signers such as JK Rowling, the British author of the Harry Potter novels. Less well-known is Atlantic contributor Jesse Singal, who is into “concern-trolling” against trans kids. In other words, seeing teens as not having the capacity to decide whether they can make the right decision about transitioning. Of course, when 40 percent of them attempt suicide out of misery, maybe there should be some leeway. Another is Katie Herzog, a freelance writer who was focused on “detransitioners”, those small number of people who regretted their decision and then began identifying with their birth sex again. All three have been “cancelled” for their positions but none has suffered any professional consequences.

Five days after my critique of the open letter appeared on CounterPunch, which had virtually nothing to say about transgender, an article by Robert Jensen appeared there as well. Jensen, a professor emeritus from U. of Texas best known for his articles on foreign policy, defended the open letter and particularly the grievances of people like JK Rowling who have been supposedly victimized for their opinions on transgender issues. A local radical bookstore in Austin cut all ties with him and other speaking engagements have been canceled. In the past, I haven’t gainsaid such actions since they are a democratic right. No matter how much Max Blumenthal complained about bookstores canceling a reading because of his support for Assad, this was not “McCarthyism”. McCarthyism would be, for example, Hollywood screenwriters or professors being fired for signing a petition for the Popular Front in Spain.

Jensen has been writing such articles over the years for CounterPunch and other magazines. In 2014, he wrote one that labeled transitioning medical procedures such as surgery and hormones as contrary to ecological principles as if someone desperately trying to change their sexual identity had something in common with climate change. You might get the idea from such a claim that Jensen has his head up his ass. If you look at his newest article, that take will be reinforced. He writes:

One of the basic points that radical feminists—along with many other writers—have made is that biological sex categories are real and exist outside of any particular cultural understanding of those categories.

If you click the “radical feminist” link, you’ll arrive at an article in Spiked Online titled “The trans ideology is a threat to womanhood” by Meghan Murphy. I guess you can tell from the title that this is openly transphobic. In November 2018, Murphy got booted from Twitter after referring to a trans woman as “him”. She had consistently been using the wrong pronoun and using pre-transition names for transgendered people. I haven’t been following the JK Rowling controversies but I doubt that there’s much difference between her and Murphy.

As for “other writers”, that link takes you to the Wall Street Journal article titled “The Dangerous Denial of Sex”, an opinion piece by Colin M. Wright and Emma N. Hilton. The brunt of the article is to establish that there are two biological categories for sex and that is anti-scientific to accept a transgender person on their own terms. Of course, it wasn’t too long ago when psychologists and scientists held the same rigid views on heterosexuality as a norm.

I come to these discussions not as a theorist but as someone who developed an appreciation for transgender issues as a film critic. Although I never got around to reviewing “A Fantastic Woman”, this great 2017 Chilean film tells the story of a transgender female whose older male companion dies unexpectedly. Excluded from his funeral and left without any support that a married woman might benefit from, the titular character asserts her rights both as the man’s significant other and as a human being deserving respect in her own right”. The film is available on Amazon Prime. More recently, I saw “The Garden We Left Behind” that, like the Chilean film, stars a transgender actor. My review begins:

For most people on the left who are supportive of transgender rights, including me, there’s still little understanding of the realities of transgender life. Having gay friends and comrades is ubiquitous but unless you count a transgender person as part of your social circle, your knowledge tends to be based on what you’ve read about the well-known such as Chelsea Manning. To get that understanding, there’s no better place to start than Flavio Alves’s “The Garden Left Behind” that will be available as VOD on December 13th (Amazon Prime, iTunes, etc).

It stars Carlie Guevara as Tina Carrera, a transgender, 20-something, undocumented Mexican immigrant living and working as a gypsy cab driver in Queens, a far cry from the superheroes, mafia gangsters, ingenues, and cops that you can see in the typical Hollywood movie. Even though Tina’s grandmother Eliana accepts her without qualifications, she still calls her Antonio, a function more of long-time family ties than prejudice.

Unfortunately, the film is not yet available on VOD.

Finally, there is “Changing the Game”, a documentary about transgender teens competing in various sports and putting up with the resistance from parents who feel that they are cheating. This is one of the major issues facing such kids today. My review began:

Like Flavio Alves’s narrative film about a transgender female, “Changing the Game” is a much-needed documentary that will open your minds to one of the most despised minorities in the USA. In this film, we meet a trans male and two trans females who are high school students competing in wrestling and track respectively. As you may know, this has become a major controversy lately as parents of cisgender athletes demand their expulsion from competitions. Mack (born Mackenzie) has been forced to compete with cisfemales even though his deepest desire is to wrestle other boys. That mattered much more to him than becoming the 110-pound class Texas state champion in 2017 and 2018. What makes this film so great in addition to the utter honesty and magnetic personalities of its principals is the support they get from their parents or, in Mack’s case, the grandparents who adopted him after his mom could not provide adequate financial support. They are quintessential Red State personalities but utterly on his side. The grandmother is a cop and the grandfather is a good old boy in bib overalls but don’t let their appearance fool you. Every word out their mouth spells compassion in capital letters.

Like “The Garden We Left Behind”, the film is not yet available on VOD. Keep on the lookout for them.

Most of the articles on the left written about transgendered people involve a lot of theorizing about gender, the biology of sex, psychoanalysis, etc., with references to Judith Butler and a lot of professors writing for specialized journals. I can recommend Richard Seymour’s article in Salvage titled “None Shall Pass: Trans and the Rewriting of the Body” that is roughly divided into two parts. The first part I found most useful since it answers people like Robert Jensen. The second part was an attempt to apply Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to transgender people, which was above my pay grade, I’m afraid. But this snippet from the first part should motivate you to look at the article:

For many who style themselves as ‘trans-critical’, however, being trans is either a delusion or a pretence. “The physical transformations created by hormones and surgery,” Sheila Jeffreys, asserts in Gender Hurts, “do not change the biological sex of the persons upon whom they are visited.”
Jeffreys makes no attempt to argue for this point, but in the past she would not have been expected to, as the state would have agreed with it on the grounds that ‘natural’ sex was the only legitimate basis for heterosexual marriage. Jacqueline Rose recounts the case of April Ashley at length for the London Review of Books, in which the judge made exactly this distinction, claiming that Ashley’s vagina was simply not big enough to accommodate a penis. Anne Fausto-Sterling, in Sexing The Body, describes a similar case in which a marriage between a man and “a woman born without a vagina” was annulled on the grounds that the artificial vagina was only two inches deep, and sex of this kind was a “quasi-natural connexion” to reduce a man to. It is notable that this unexpected convergence of heterosexist, patriarchal reaction with the politics of a militant lesbian feminist takes place around the ‘naturalness’ of the body.

Needless to say, these issues will remain with us for the foreseeable future since the Republican Party will exploit transphobia to win votes for a losing cause.

It is not only the Republican Party that is transphobic. The Socialist Workers Party, a group I belonged to for 11 years, has the same reactionary politics as Robert Jensen. In a recent issue of the Militant newspaper, you can read this assessment of the Supreme Court ruling on a LBGT case:

The decision as issued strengthens the hand of those transgender campaigners who argue that sex is a subjective feeling, not an objective fact, and seek to pillory and threaten anyone who says otherwise. It deals a counterrevolutionary blow to the fight for women’s emancipation.

It also weakens the overall fight to end discrimination against gays and lesbians.

None of these fucking stupid articles take into account the massive sympathy that is developing for the right of people to adopt a sexual identity that allows them a certain amount of gratification as opposed to the daily torture that leads so many of them to suicide. I’ve been retired from Columbia University for nearly a decade but stop occasionally for yearly “international luncheons” in which employees bring meals from their home countries. Yeah, Columbia is big on diversity. Get used to it, Walter Benn Michaels.

When I stop in to take a pee, I get satisfaction out of seeing a sign on the door asking people to use the bathroom whose gender they identify with. As you might expect, an Ivy school is going to be ahead of the curve on something like this. But what if you were a transgender female with a factory job? What would it be like to be forced to use the men’s room because you still had a penis? In most cases, you might get a punch in the mouth. Even worse, if you walk down the wrong street, you might get killed. A March 28th article in the Daily News was titled “Transgender woman fatally stabbed in the neck in Harlem; friend believes she was killed over a wig” Can you believe that? Killed over a wig?

Some commentators took issue with the Harper’s Open Letter showing up during a massive movement against killer-cops. As good liberals, they probably support it but for the kind of support that really matters, you have to appreciate the massive outpouring for Black transgender people at a BLM protest in Brooklyn shown in the video above. It took place on June 14th, the day before Jensen’s wretched article appeared. The NY Times reported:

One speaker at the rally was Melania Brown, sister of Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman who was found dead in 2019 in a cell at Rikers Island.

“Black trans lives matter! My sister’s life mattered!” Brown said in her speech. “If one goes down, we all go down — and I’m not going nowhere.”

Black transgender people not only bear a disproportionate burden of police violence but also face high rates of violence and harassment on the street. The American Medical Association said last fall that killings of transgender women of color in the United States amounted to an epidemic.

Two more black transgender women nationwide were killed in less than 24 hours while the event was coming together. Dominique Fells, 27, known as Rem’Mie, was found with stab wounds in Philadelphia on June 8, Rolling Stone reported. A day later, Riah Milton, 25, was found shot multiple times in Liberty Township, Ohio.

None of these realities impinge on the articles written by the Open Letter signers, Robert Jensen or any other transphobic leftists. From now until a socialist revolution triumphs in the USA, you can bet that transgender people will be on its side. Just as long, of course, if our movement has the wisdom and the courage to stand up for their rights.

July 19, 2020

Japan Cuts 2020

Filed under: Film,Japan — louisproyect @ 9:46 pm

Like other film festivals I’ve reviewed since the pandemic began, this year’s Japan Cuts is virtual. While nothing will ever match the experience of see a film on the big screen among other film buffs, the show must go on as they say in a Busby Berkeley film—can’t remember which one. At $99 for the entire festival or $7 per film, it is certainly worth it. In the past, when I have covered a NY film festival, I always regretted that many of my out-of-town readers will never be able to take part. Fortunately, for them and for the filmmakers who put so much time, money and energy making leading-edge cinema, virtuality has its benefits. Time constraints did not allow me to cover more than four films but based on what I have seen, this festival is a must for film buffs. Japanese films have been a mainstay of serious cinema for the past seventy years and it is still going strong.

Documentaries

i -Documentary of the Journalist

Isoko Mochizuki is Japan’s Helen Thomas. Until she died in 2013, Thomas was famous for stubbornly asking tough questions during press conferences at the White House. Mochizuki is Thomas on steroids. The documentary follows her around collecting information for her next article in the Tokyo Shimbun, usually focused on corporate an governmental malfeasance. Under Shinzo Abe’s administration since 2012, corruption has been rife and she has been practically the only reporter with the guts to take on the establishment.

What you will discover in this mostly cinéma vérité work, which follows her about on her rounds and at press conferences, is that the Japanese government is shielded from the most part from gadflies like her. To get access to a press conference, you have to be part of an old boy’s network that keeps trouble-makers out. It is not so much ideological as it is institutional. Picture McNeil-Lehrer at its most soporific and you’ll get a sense of the typical Japanese reporter.

You can’t help but think of Kurosawa’s “The Bad Sleep Well” as the film progresses. She has discovered that the USA has been expanding the Henoko military base in Okinawa at the expense of the people living there, which has been the case since 1609 when Japan colonized the island nation. To make room for its partner’s war machine, the government conveniently covered up how red dirt was being used for a landfill into the bay. Since red dirt upsets marine ecology, regulations do not permit using earth with more than 10 percent of red clay. In her interviews with environmental scientists in Okinawa, Mochizuki learned that it was closer to 70 percent.

Much of the film consists of her trying to pin down Abe’s chief spokesman at press conferences, Yoshihide Suga. Suga is a master of stonewalling, making most of Trump’s mouthpieces looking transparent by comparison. Unlike the American press corps that has any number of reporters willing to challenge Trump or his lackies, it devolved upon Mochizuki to challenge the lies.

Although most of us, including me, tend to associate Trump with people like Duterte and Bolsonaro, an argument can be made that his real soulmate is Shinzo Abe. After seeing the film, I was convinced that I had to allocate time for getting up to speed on Japanese politics since the Abe government has vowed to make Japan a first-rate military power. As part of its increasingly nationalistic military and economic posture, Japan has targeted South Korea in the same way that the USA has targeted China. An article titled “Forget Putin and Kim. Trump’s real soulmate lives in Tokyo” describes the bromance between the two nationalistic and corrupt politicians:

That Abe is now borrowing from Trump’s playbook on trade should come as little surprise. The two leaders have established a positive chemistry that is evident during their long and frequent meetings. When Trump visited Japan in May for the enthronement of the country’s new emperor, the two leaders embraced each other, sharing a round of golf, sushi, sumo wrestling and exchange of MAGA-inspired caps. Abe is known to be one of a few Western leaders Trump is fond of.

Reiwa Uprising

Although I didn’t plan my coverage this way, this film is a perfect companion piece to “i -Documentary of the Journalist”. It is a four-hour mostly cinéma vérité look at the election campaign of the Reiwa Shinsengumi (“new squad”) party that fielded 10 candidates to run against the Abe machine in 2019.

Reiwa can best be described as Japan’s version of the sort of guerrilla theater Abby Hoffman made famous in the 1960s. If Abe’s party was determined to represent itself as the embodiment of Japan’s largely militaristic and authoritarian culture, Reiwa turned that culture upside down and ran candidates who were the country’s outcasts and underdogs.

The star of the film is candidate Ayumi Yasutomi, a female transgender Tokyo University professor whose hobby is horseback riding. To show her love for horses that represent the natural world disappearing beneath Japan’s feet, she was accompanied by a horse at all her campaign appearances. Yasutomi’s politics are not exactly ideological. At one point she says that Marxism, liberalism and conservatism have failed Japan. If she was referring to the Japanese Communist Party, I suppose she had a point.

Two of the candidates were quadriplegics, who also happened to be the only two that were elected to the Diet, thus making Reiwa an official party.

The film was directed by Kazuo Hara, who like Isoko Mochizuki has no use for Shinzo Abe’s retrograde social and economic policies. Like Werner Herzog, Hara is drawn to those who are square pegs in bourgeois society’s round holes. Made in 1972, his first film “Goodbye CP” featured men and women with cerebral palsy. His 1987 “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” features Kenzo Okuzaki, a 62-year-old WWII veteran who searches out those responsible for the unexplained deaths of two soldiers in his old unit. Errol Morris listed it as one of his Top 5 Favorite Films for Rotten Tomatoes. After seeing his latest, I hope to see more of his work. Highest recommendation for “Reiwa Uprising” that at four hours goes quicker than 90 percent of the films coming out of Hollywood.

Narrative films

The Murders of Oiso

Although people are killed in this film, it is really not a murder mystery. Instead, it is a character study of four high-school students who represent the kind of toxic values that might explain to some degree how Shinzo Abe has become longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.

Their time is spent hanging out, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and playing cards. Perhaps, they are no different than most teens but it is their indifference to anything outside their narrow frame of reference that makes you wonder about the health of Japanese society. Indeed, a large part of Reiwa’s success at the polls has to do with the country’s moral and spiritual rot.

The leader of the pack is a kid named Kazuya, whose father and uncle are partner’s in a crooked construction company, probably one not much different than the one pouring red dirt in to the water near the US military base in Okinawa. Kazuya gets his three pals jobs with the company but they seem to spend about as much time working as the guys that Tony Soprano placed in various New Jersey unionized shops.

The film does not have a conventional narrative arc and dispenses with the kind of suspense you expect in a murder mystery. (Not a single cop shows up in the entire film.) Like the two documentaries above, it is much more of a critical eye on Japanese society that is very much watching if you forgive its defiance of conventional filmmaking gestures.

Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp

The festival includes three of the Tora-San films as part of a retrospective. I was especially interested in them since I regard the director/screenwriter Yoji Yamada as one of Japan’s greatest. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I had hopes that it might have been in the same vein as his samurai trilogy that I regard as a masterpiece.

I guess I should have realized that any film with “our loveable tramp” in the title is not going to be about sword fights. Instead, it features Kiyoshi Atsumi as Toro-san in just one of the 48 films Yamada did with him in this series from 1969 to 1995. Perhaps the only thing that Toro-san has in common with the samurai, especially after the Meiji restoration when they became itinerant swords-for-hire, is that he is rootless. He is a traveling salesman who owns nothing but the clothes on his back and his suitcase filled with dubious wares, none of which would qualify for an ad on a cable TV commercial at 3am in the morning.

As for being “loveable”, that’s used ironically since like Charlie Chaplin, Toro-san is anything but. Just as the little tramp was not above turning a dinner party into a food-fight, Toro-san always finds a way to antagonize people, always with no awareness of the consequence of his actions.

After returning to the town where he was born, he reunites with his long-lost sister who he hasn’t seen in twenty years. When he accompanies her to a dinner party hosted by the boss of the company where she works (she is soon to become engaged to his son), Toro-san gets drunk and starts to tell off-color jokes and generally embarrassing his sister. If you’ve seen Borat in action, you’ll get an idea of what kind of mischief his character is capable of.

Unlike Borat, Toro-san has an epiphany toward the end of the film when he discovers that the woman he loves has plans to marry someone much higher-up on the social ladder. Although the Toro-san films are comedies, they do reflect Japan’s strict class-based social codes that the anti-hero defies with abandon. Ironically, in his own way, he was the kind of film character that prefigured the Reiwa uprising. A man sick and tired of hierarchy, materialism and hypocrisy.

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