Monthly Archives: March 2012

The Hunger Games

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We had our Annenberg Innovation Summit yesterday and it was a smashing success. So today for the first time in two weeks I went to the movies. I saw Hunger Games, because I am going to give a lecture on Monday on technology, politics and the future. The movie is the latest in a long line of dystopian science fiction films from Metropolis to Bladerunner. I long since came to the conclusion that science fiction is our way of writing about our fears about the present. Metropolis (1927) was about the exploitation of the masses in a machine age. Bladerunner (1982) takes the metaphor farther by imagining machine made humans, called Replicants. Both invoke world’s of such radical change, that we don’t recognize our self in the protagonists.

But Hunger Games is radically different, because it essentially is about the 1% vs. the 99%. It is about what could happen in the world we are experiencing today. The Hunger Games is in essence a story about Bread and Circuses. As the Poet Juvenal wrote of the period in 140 BC Rome when the politicians were for sale and the people didn’t care as along as the bloody entertainments kept coming.

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:bread and circuses

We start the movie in an Appalachia not too far distant from the haunting Walker Evans photos of the Great Depression. Dirt poor coal miners living under constant police presence. All power and money resides in the Capitol–a New York on Steroids. The Capitol is filed with a society of the very rich that are every bit as decadent as Rome in Calligulas’ time or New York in Andy Warhol’s prime. The Hunger Games are a combination Reality Show and Gladiator match. The contest creates a kind of  Lord of the Flies world with knives, spears and (most importantly) a bow and arrow that our heroine wields beautifully.

But finally it is a story of teen empowerment and rebellion. It is a vision of a future of the total failure of democracy because security of the rich was more important. That’s a very dark belief that obviously millions of young readers of the novels have bought in to. That the movie made $150 million in its first weekend is testimony that some profound mental shift has happened in the society. 1%-99% metaphor has sunk in to the collective consciousness.

Now that it is obvious that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, this same metaphor will dominate the political debate. Mitt is the candidate of and for the 1%. Look at his tax policy, which will enrich them and his hawkish military policy which will continue the 65 year Military Industrial Complex boondoggle, further enriching them. Finally his oil and environmental policies are made for the Koch Brothers and their friends in the oil and gas business.

The trick for Obama is to make the connection to the 18-24 year olds who didn’t get a chance to vote last time. These are the kids lining up for Hunger Games. I sense they are ready for Obama’s message. But he has to take on the Inequality Issue head on.

You Can’t Handle the Truth

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This week’s news brings to mind Jack Nicholson’s famous rant in “A Few Good Men”. We see the truth staring us in the face, and we can’t handle it.

Mitt Romney’s aide Eric Fehrnstrom repeated Richard Nixon’s advice to run hard to the right in the primaries and steer back to the center for the general election. The Republican conservatives and the news media acted as if this was some sort of apostasy. Fehrnstrom’s one mistake was using a metaphor which could be visualized:the Etch-A-Sketch.

My sense is that Romney is already starting his pivot to the center because he realizes that the Tea Party is a spent force. America is not a Right Wing country despite Rush Limbaugh’s protestations. The business wing of the Republican Party see an epic defeat in their future, borne on the wings of all the talk about returning women’s rights to the 1950′s, invading Iran and impeaching moderate and liberal judges. Continue reading →

Long Goodbye

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Politics on a Presidential level fills me with joy. It’s like watching the NBA Finals. Even when the players have a bad night, the stakes involved in the series is so high, that a true fan of the game can take comfort in even the lamest  post game posturing. No matter how Mitt Romney tries to spin it, last night was a bad night. The evening began with the Romney mouthpiece Matt Drudge all but declaring Romney the winner for the night, based on the early exit polls. What of course Drudge forgot was that working people don’t vote at 10:30 AM. The only people voting early are what my mother used to call “the coupon clippers” and by that she didn’t mean supermarket coupons. In the Fifties corporate Bonds literally had a quarterly coupon that you would “clip” and cash in at your bank. So if you were rich enough to live off your investments all you had to do was to go down to your “Bank and Trust Company” once a quarter and clip your coupons. That’s the way Mitt Romney and his 1 percenters still live. And they vote in the morning, on their way to the country club.

Of course Mitt wound up in third place in both Alabama and Misssissippi, once the working class voted.  Mitt and his Super Pac outspent Santorum ten to one. The Romney campaign is sputtering.  Santorum on the other hand seems to have hit his stride. He’s kind of like Dan Ackroyd in the Blues Brothers–he’s on a mission–and neither money nor good sense is going to keep him from Tampa. Romney seems to have everything to lose and Santorum seems to have nothing to lose. Romney is so patently inauthentic and he just  hopes the establishment can push him through, before the grass roots has time to realize they’ve been played. But people see right through the “cheezy grits” phony and reject him. Of course Gingrich’s ego-manaical refusal to get out of the race make Santorum’s job a lot harder. For Gingrich this campaign has turned into a Reality Show, much like the Salafi’s, the couple that crashed the White House Dinner last year. Newt and Calista are determined to crash the party in Tampa this summer. How could they possibly stay in the media spotlight if he “quit the show”.

Which leads us inevitably to the fall election. Despite the handwringing over the Washington Post Poll this week, the President is in pretty good shape.For one thing, all the pundits saying that gas prices will pull down the Presidents ratings should be aware that gas makes up only 3.5% of the consumer budget.  As the Pew Poll pointed out, Obama beats Romney handily in the fall.

So if Romney wins, it could be a tight race, but Obama will win. But if somehow the Tea Party manages to capture the convention, denying Romney the win because he didn’t have it tied up before the convention, then we could have an historic November election. Assuming Rick Santorum is the candidate,  we might have a “choice election” (not an echo) that might look like 1964.  Santorum may be sincere, but I really doubt you want to re-litigate the culture wars in 2012 over birth control, homosexuality and school prayer. It could be the Republican wipeout that would change contemporary politics, for it would show that the wingers, the ditto heads only make up a small minority in America and we are sick and tired of them telling us how to live our lives.

Liberty, Anarchy & The Digital Age

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Sabu

About a year ago I was at the house of my friend David Fanning on the Massachusetts coast when a call came in that messed up our weekend plans. David has been the Executive Producer of PBS’s flagship show Frontline for 25 years. He has fearlessly told truth to power, despite all the possible reverberations in Congress or elsewhere and the fragile funding of PBS. The call came from his webmaster who said that the whole Frontline website had been destroyed by a hacker collective called Lulzsec. Lulzsec and their leader, Sabu had been outraged by a frontline documentary on Julian Assange and had vowed revenge. I had seen the show and found it to be very evenhanded, but Sabu and his friends objected to a passage in which Julian Assange’s tactics were questioned. When Assange first gave the raw intelligence cables from the State Department, all of the names of the local informants in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were in the docs. The editors of the Guardian and the New York Times insisted on redacting the names of the local informants so they wouldn’t be killed for helping the Americans. Assange insisted the names stay in and started dumping the raw files out on Wikileaks. That anyone should even question Assange was too much for Lulzsec and so they waged cyberwar on Frontline. They didn’t just bring down the website, they destroyed it and all the archives. It took David Fanning weeks and a lot of money to restore the site. Continue reading →

Andrew Breitbart, RIP

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As readers of this blog know, I have somewhat of a following among the libertarian right.  I don’t really understand it except that there is a deep part of me that distrusts centralization, whether in academic bureaucracies, corporate headquarters or in government institutions. So I guess I was not surprised when a couple of people wrote me this week and asked me to say something about the death of Andrew Breitbart. I know my liberal friends are going to be angry with this post, but so be it.

I had met Andrew for the first time two months ago over dinner in a Santa Monica steakhouse. I had come at the invitation of a conservative friend who wanted me to see that Breitbart was not the demon that I had depicted him as, during the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. When I left the restaurant after a large meal and multiple bottles of red wine I had a couple of impressions that stayed with me. First was that Andrew was a somewhat charming provocateur, much in the spirit of Abby Hoffman. Like Hoffman, I was never sure Breitbart really believed half the shit that came out of his mouth, but his main purpose seemed to be a social irritant.

The second impression from the dinner was that Andrew was sick at heart about the prospects of beating Obama in 2012. He called the current Republican field “pygmies” and I actually believe he felt that Sarah Palin would have been a far better candidate. I laughed at that. He truly despised Obama, and in some weird way I think he felt that the election of 2008 had been the culmination of an era of political correctness, which he considered to be the main source of evil in the modern world. Just why Barack became the focus of his anger, I couldn’t fathom, but I came to see this loathing as something that was not connected to a rational process, but rather something more from his “reptilian brain”. This kind of anger is not kind to your heart.

So how ironic that the day of Andrew’s passing that Rush Limbaugh, a far less charming angry man of the right, chose once again to dive into the deep pool of misogyny that has defined his career since he first used the term “Feminazi”.  Limbaugh’s assertion about Susan Fluke being a “prostitute and a slut” are so unhinged that one can only believe he is back on the “hillbilly heroin” (OxyContin) again. So Limbaugh may be just a drug-addled “entertainer”, but what is Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich’s excuse for that same attitude— believing we have been on the road to damnation as a country since the pill was introduced and Rock and Roll eclipsed Frank Sinatra? In my book, Outlaw Blues, I quote Sinatra in 1956 saying that Rock was filled with “sly, lewd and dirty lyrics”, performed by “cretinous goons”. Of course Frank was pissed off at Elvis, but why is Rick Santorum still angry about the sexual revolution fifty years later?

In some weird way I hope that Rick Santorum does become the standard bearer for the Republican Party. I have said from the beginning of this campaign that I would really like a showdown between President Obama and a Tea Party Conservative. If Romney wins the nomination, he will weasel back to the center so fast it will make your head spin. The fact that Romney is unwilling to denounce Limbaugh proves what a spineless toad he is.

But not Rick. With him as the candidate it will be “a choice not an echo” and in my view will be a total repeat of Goldwater’s 1964 drubbing. The country will come to the realization that we are not a hard right society and that the Tea Party is a minority cult. And then maybe, with some real breathing room after an epic victory, the Democrats might reexamine some of the ideas of subsidiarity and decentralization that might realign some of the anti-war libertarians and the true liberals in a new progressivism.

Which brings me back to Breitbart. He wanted a choice election too, but not the choice of “pygmies” like Romney, Santorum or Gingrich. Although he liked Limbaugh, he despised Glenn Beck. Over the course of the dinner I kept saying that I was a classic Liberal. I believed in liberty and equality of opportunity. And he kept saying that he believed in those things too, but that “liberalism” had been demeaned by the Left. If we had had time, we might have come to some meeting ground. But it was not to be.