Film at 11

by Morgan Dash

On the night that the conglomerate media candidate claimed victory, the Turner Classic Movie Channel happened to be running all three Boris Karloff Frankenstein films. A fine counterpoint and counterpart to what must have been shown on the cable news channels.

I expect to be watching the Turner Classic Movie Channel exclusively for the foreseeable future. Thank you and goodnight from California.

Dictatorship Made Easy

One of us here at American Samizat suggested some months ago that the Bush Administration attack on Iraq, and in fact its basic response to 9-11, would reverberate throughout the world, emboldening new violence from friend as well as foe. The evidence of this sad unfolding continues its deadly march.

Allies most conspicuous in their frequent, continuing and escalating assertion of the right to various new violent policies have been Israel and Russia. Israel's attack on Syria is the latest instance. It may have been a single attack on a terrorist base, but it shattered the precedents that had limited violence in the region, with consequences that could be extremely dire. The U.S. had little choice but to agree that Israel could attack a sovereign nation in order to fight terrorism.

The point is not that any specific move is or isn't justified by circumstances. But that violent reaction is now the first reaction, a first resort rather than only with the most extreme justification. Iraq did that, and so did the response to 9-11, a combination of cynical exploitation and giving in to the reflex of fear, a sad abdication of leadership and an even sadder abdication of the people's responsibilities in a republic.

Israel is not the only instance. In moves that have not made conspicuous headlines here, Russia has recently asserted its right to preemptive strikes on other countries, and it has followed the Bush administration in considering the use of so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. While the U.S. has in fact used weapons in Iraq that push closer to the definition of nuclear, and the Bush administration wants to pursue several avenues of research into smaller scale nuclear weapons, Russia has suggested it might actually use battlefield nukes. But about the only people who noticed were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the city governments protested such a policy.

There is little that the U.S. can say about other nations breaking peaceful precedents or consensual restraints without being more obviously hypocritical than usual. The Bush administration is encouraging a more violent, more dangerous world.

George Orwell pointed out that what dictatorships require more than anything else is an enemy. That includes dictatorships of the proletariat, and this brazen attempted dictatorship of the oligarchy. But what the Bush administration is creating is a world of enemies. All the better to scare you with, my dears.

Stanley Crouch points out that the real lesson of the death camps is often missed, and it is that a supposedly educated, advanced, modern society is not automatically saved by those conditions from committing acts of genocidal barbarism. This may be the greatest country in the history of the world and all that, but that's no guarantee of virtue or self-knowledge.

Let's get a little perspective here. Nearly a month after a hurricane brushed by, one of the wealthiest communities in the world (in suburban Virginia) is still without telephone service. Millions of people were without electricity for days and some for weeks. These and other accidents and acts of nature reveal vulnerabilities that aren't likely to be addressed by bombing people in foreign countries. Our homeland isn't even secure against hurricanes, let alone terrorism. In our homes we are not secure against illness or unemployment. At the same time the health care system is falling apart because the health insurance system is crazed and collapsing under its own weight, it is more and more acceptable morally, culturally and socially for medical care to be denied those who need it but can't pay, and for those who can't get decently paying work or any work at all to slip into homelessness from the middle class in a matter of months.

Out of fear and self-righteous denial, lost in a televised delusion, we are becoming a cruel and callous people. We may wallow in our sentimental attachment to the television tragedy of the hour, but we are numbed to the crises around us. As long as we are distracted by speed and yoked to the chariots of fashion as we cycle endlessly through the maze of earn and spend, blind to our real motivations and the consequences of our public attitudes and actions, we will continue to be so easy to manipulate that dictatorship may as well be automated, carried out by computer chips in every appliance of our lives.

Can they recall?

In little more than 24 hours, the CA polls will open for the recall election. What will voters be thinking about? Will they recall the reasons so many thought Bush was more likable than Gore and therefore should be president, because 4 years of him on TV would be easier to stomach? Or that there was really no difference between Bush and Gore so it didn't matter which one you voted for, or especially if you voted for someone else?

Do they recall that when they took out their frustrations on their ballots, the U.S. was at peace, and the federal government had huge surpluses predicted into the indefinite future--enough to fix social security and Medicare and redress the inequities and injustices and meet the federal responsibilities pretty much everybody agrees on, but that the Reagan-Bush era bled of funding?

Arnold was a bad idea before, and for California, quite possibly a tragic idea. Now of course it's worse. On Sunday the allegations against him virtually disappeared from TV news. But to read a detailed story about even the latest round (which brings the number of women lodging accusations to 15) is to be convinced that there's something really wrong here.

Hold your nose, California, and vote against recall. Vote for Bustamante. Despite the conventional wisdom, which is puzzling at best, that he has run a bad campaign, he remains the most viable, honorable and most attractive candidate. He'd probably make a better governor than Davis. He'd certainly shake things up, and the issues would be defined for all to see, instead of this murky muddiness coming out of Sacramento.

But what we definitely don't want is the kind of whim and denial in the voting booth that gave us Bush, war, confusion, billions of dollars of debt and responsibilities way into the future, crippling our own country, causing untold suffering and hardship, and leaving us more vulnerable than ever.

Unfortunately this sorry circus probably won't even be over soon---the vote counting may turn into another extended nightmare. Yet as weird as this campaign has been (when the guy who promoted the recall ends up advising people to vote against recalling Davis, and one of the candidates drops out and throws her support against the recall) this isn't virtual reality. What happens Tuesday will have real consequences for real people throughout California, the U.S. and the world. As well as for the world that will face beings not yet born.

Fairness

In the last frenzied weekend of the recall campaign, the Arnold army is screaming that he isn't being treated fairly. Arnold is being accused of a variety of possibly criminal acts, allegedly committed at various times and in various places over the past thirty years. As of Saturday, the number of women publicly making these charges reached 11. The election is Tuesday.

The rhetoric on both sides heated up, with Governor Davis suggesting some of the alleged offenses are of a criminal nature, and likely to distract a governor from governing the state. At the same time, Arnold charged that Davis was behind these "dirty campaign" tactics, and his campaign manager fumed that the L.A. Times was politically motivated, and not fit to own a printing press.

The Los Angeles Times newspaper, which broke these stories, claims it printed them as soon as they were deemed ready, using ordinary professional journalistic standards. Arnold's opponents claim they are not the sources of the stories, nor has any evidence surfaced that they are.

A barrage of such charges so close to election day allows little time for point by point refutation, and unleashing them at this time certainly seems unfair. But the entire recall process is unfair. Apart from its basic injustice, especially when it resembles a prosecution of a duly elected governor on unspecified crimes, the recall does not follow the normal rules of elections. The Arnold campaign didn't balk at the comparatively short period of campaigning when it was to Arnold's advantage.

As a major celebrity, Arnold had an easy time promoting his candidacy. Major media was quivering at his feet. His visibility and celebrity persona behind a feckless but focus group tested emotional message moved the polls. Together with the money this celebrity and this apparently foregone coronation attracted, his millions bought still more air time for slick celebrity commercials. There was not very much time to look at his ideas, his policies, his past, and his fitness for office. Millions got a chance to see and hear him. No one got a chance to know him.

In a normal campaign cycle, these allegations might well have surfaced weeks or months before the election. The Arnold people must have hoped they would outrun this barrage. They didn't quite make it. Arnold may still become governor, but it's not clear he could govern.

Still, there is another issue of fairness that is quite troubling. Last week the polls seemed to indicate that Arnold would win. Someone interpreted the numbers to a single story line: it was an Arnold vs. Davis race. This despite the actual poll numbers which showed Governor Davis being recalled by a margin greater than that between Arnold and his main challenger, Cruz Bustamante.

This so-called campaign began with a media blitz of Arnold images. Despite that first barrage, early polls showed Bustamante ahead. He was actually seen on television news and interview programs a few times after that. Then new polls showed Arnold ahead, and Cruz completely disappeared. Even after these allegations became news, the pictures were still of Arnold and occasionally of Davis. Bustamante had to be content with debating the other Republican on state PBS stations.

Cruz Bustamante is Latino. He has been criticized for championing, and being supported by, California Indian casinos. In a week that saw a powerful white male media creation get booted from a sports show for a "racially insensitive" (and pretty stupid) comment concerning a black quarterback, there was no visible awareness of the racial implications of this campaign and how it is covered.

But even apart from issues of fairness concerning race, there are basic issues of fairness in covering elections. As electronic media in this country grew, a civic culture that treated elections as serious matters and news as important, together with laws and FCC regulations such as "equal time" provisions and the Fairness Doctrine, generally ensured as a matter of course that the major candidates would get fair and more or less equal treatment. There would be some attempt at balance, and it was likely that on every news report, what each major candidate said and did that day would be reported. On television, pictures of one candidate would invariably be followed by pictures of the other.

As limited as it was (especially on non-major candidates) all of that is gone now. The basic fairness necessary for fair elections has been sacrificed to the same market-driven, celebrity-dependent and sensationalist priorities as rule entertainment and commercials.

The Reagan era death of the Fairness Doctrine has permitted the wholesale takeover of radio and cable TV talk by self-righteous, self-promoting rabid right know-it-alls. The wholesale takeover of broadcasting frequencies and cable bandwidth by a handful of conglomerates keeps discourse within profitable bounds. They have all learned how to push the glandular fight-or-flight buttons of the public, and so they compete for the highest numbers with lowest common denominator violence seasoned with eye-candy and brain-nicotine.

After all those sweaty monosyllabic epics, Arnold the Barbarian should have figured out by now that he who lives by the sword can die by the sword after the next commercial.