Maya of Arabia

What's bugging me about the Zero Dark Thirty controversy is how it has blocked any discussion of the movie's place in film history.  I'm not sure if this is the result of sexism, as if Kathryn Bigelow wouldn't be thinking in those terms, or just political sensitivities (my friends to the left are the ones condemning the film by comparing it to the work of Leni Riefenstahl - an incredibly sexist comparison) but when looked at within the context of Hollywood genre's, ZDT is the increasingly rare beast of an historical epic, at a time when every so-called-epic from Hollywood is a science fiction or superhero story.  The last great historical epic was, of course, Titanic, interestingly enough made by Bigelow's former husband.

Where ZDT fits is as the bookend to Lawrence of Arabia.  Each movie deals with the West's involvement with Middle Eastern politics, one from the start in the 20th Century, the other for the 21st.  Back then it's one British officer struggling through the desert, now it's batteries of U.S. soldiers flying in and out with impunity, but it both cases there's the sense of "other," that the West can never, no matter how embedded, truly understand or have a place in the desert worlds.  The threats to Maya's life are essentially urban - an assassination attempt rather than dying of thirst - but there's watching still the lone figure coming from a great distance (a fateful car rather than Omar Sharif), the hero putting on the local headgear to operate in the area, the lonely military outposts in a hostile land.

The question isn't whether the movie endorses torture, it's "Where do you want to go?" which Chastain outed on The Daily Show as the existential last line of the movie.  In Lawrence, a man is driven insane by his immersion into this Middle Eastern world.  In ZDT it's a nation (with Maya as the metaphor).  Lawrence posits that his Western influence helped create the desert nations.  ZDT asks if and how we want to be engaged with these very same nations - if, in another twist on the same theme in Lawrence, there a brutalization like torture involved.

ZDT's immediacy is blinding the arguers to the true nature (and greatness) of this movie.  Sorry, Bigelow and Boal didn't wait thirty years to tell this huge story.  They were brave enough -- and smart enough -- to tell a nine-year epic tale just moments after it concluded.

Jacked

So with less than a month to go before taking the reins of U.S. foreign policy, President-Elect Barack Obama gets some sudden fences, starting with the Israeli attack on Gaza, in retaliation for the recent resumption by Hamas of missile attacks on southern Israel. The upshot:

Part of what is going on today with Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak's unleashing of massive Israeli airpower against Hamas offices in Gaza is a test of Obama's America. Hamas's decision to end its "lull", or temporary ceasefire with Israel, also has a lot to do with testing the U.S. and seeing what the outlines of Obama's policy will be.

Barack Obama cannot afford to allow his presidency and its foreign policy course to be hijacked by either side in this increasingly blurry dispute. Israel's actions today just created thousands of aggrieved and vengeful relatives committed to delivering some blowback against Israel.

Hamas, at the same time, overplayed its hand at a fragile time. Hamas will never play the role of supplicant or subordinate to Israel's interests -- but its resumption of violence before the Israeli elections and during a time of transition in US politics triggered a devastating response from Israel that significantly undermined its own interests as a potentially responsible steward of a Palestinian state.

The violence we are watching is just yet another installment in the blur of tit-for-tat violence from both sides of this chronic foreign affairs ulcer.

If I were Barack, I'd be reaching for the Pepto-Bismol. Especially when George was fencing me in with this:

Agence France-Presse reports that Georgian officials will sign a "strategic partnership" treaty on Jan. 4 in Washington. On Tuesday, the Department of State issued the first confirmation that the United States and Georgia would pursue a more formal security arrangement.

I suppose it beats a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran, but the Cheney Administration still has four weeks to make it happen.

Impeachment articles would have slowed this.

Dogs

Our army trained the Georgian solders who invaded South Ossetia, starting the skirmish with Russia and Putin proved ready to escalate into a war. Another colossal miscalculation by Dick Cheney behind the throne of George Bush?

With Bush and McCain echoing their willfully oblivious "21st Century countries don't invade sovereign nations" line, and McCain's close adviser also Georgia's paid lobbyist in D.C., it all is starting to look a little color-coordinated. But both Bush and McCain are spreading the poor little Georgia meme, but even Fox television can't stop the truth from slipping through.

Meanwhile, the Administration that keeps on giving is getting yet another new investigation. Ron Suskind's allegations of Dick Cheney's forgery shop has our district's Rep., the awesome Henry Waxman, call his committee back early from summer break to dig in.

Drink up, George. It's almost over. Please end in a whimper, because I don't know if we can survive another bang.

Horror

If I weren't so burnt by our regime change experience in Iraq, I'd say go the hell into Zimbabwe and arrest dictator Robert Mugabe tonight.

The New York Times has a terrifying article on his junta's death squads kidnapping , torturing, mutilating and murdering the peaceful political opposition and even just sympathetic voters in the lead up to next week's bullshit run-off election.

Check out the link but have a strong stomach. I can't even quote from it, it's too horrible. This is happening right now, more as I write this.

It's time for the neighboring countries in Africa to act like a continent and get that vicious 82 year-old criminal, and as many of his henchmen as possible, into retirement.

This should be on everyone's mind and discussed in the U.N. on Monday. This is a real battle for democratic rights, human rights.

Death to tyrants.

Very Bad News

Nothing to joke about in Pakistan with the horrific assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The country is now officially on the brink of massive upheaval or violent repression. If you want to the get best overall view that I've read so far, Prof. Juan Cole once again makes it understandable, especially the background for what's just come home to roost:

Pakistan is important to US security. It is a nuclear power. Its military fostered, then partially turned on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which have bases in the lawless tribal areas of the northern part of the country. And Pakistan is key to the future of its neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy security of the United States.

The military government of Pervez Musharraf was shaken by two big crises in 2007, one urban and one rural. The urban crisis was his interference in the rule of law and his dismissal of the supreme court chief justice...Last June 50,000 protesters came out to defend the supreme court, even though the military had banned rallies.

The rural crisis was the attempt of a Neo-Deobandi cult made up of Pushtuns and Baluch from the north to establish themselves in the heart of the capital, Islamabad, at the Red Mosque seminary. They then attempted to impose rural, puritan values on the cosmopolitan city dwellers. When they kidnapped Chinese acupuncturists, accusing them of prostitution, they went too far....Musharraf ham-fistedly had the military mount a frontal assault on the Red Mosque and its seminary, leaving many dead and his legitimacy in shreds.

U.S.-Pakistan diplomacy now in shambles?

Will President Dick make us invade?

Truth Will Out

Maybe the biggest story developing in U.S. politics is how the Republican Party, such as it has grown to be constituted today, is re-kookifying. By which I mean that it is splintering and fragmenting again, and with each chip reveals the pieces to be fundamentally dysfunctional at best, but more often non compos mentis.

Leading the charge is "far-right wing operative and former communist agitator David Horowitz", who created something he called "Islamofascism Awareness Week" to bolster his dying speaking career. Horowitz is a leader in trying to muzzle liberal thought on campuses, in the guise of combating what he claims is a prejudice against right-wing thought.

Kooks like Horowitz seem to think that all schools should have the ideological balance reflected on Fox News. Problem is, thinking is the ideal in college study, and the modern Conservative orthodoxy has been shown as a total sham, a bankrupt ideology built on greed and fomentation of fear.

Max Blumenthal covers Horowitz at Columbia October 26th, where he even confronted him in Q&A with his own words, in which Horowitz compared his father to Mohammed Atta of that horrific 9/11 crew, all to make a circuitous ideological point.

All I can think is, does this entire Early-21st Century hole these Horowitz's and Bush/Cheneys have put us in have to be Oedipal wrecks?

Next comes the crack-up of the #1 Conservative book publishing house, Regnery Publishing, as a group of its authors sue for stolen earnings. The wingdingaling volumes include such classics as, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security and Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.

You know, sci-fi.

It seems that Regnery owns the very book clubs it sells do at loss leader-style discounts. According to The New York Times:

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

What's funny about this statement is that Regnery is actually acting like any other hyper-capitalist GOP mechanism, vertically integrating and taking advantage of a monopolistic opportunity in the marketplace that exploits elements of the creator's contract to maximize profits. Even if it screws the creator.

Jillions vs. pittance. Which side of that Hobbesian stick would anyone want to be on?

What's koo-koo is that for all the schaudenfreude, but per Kevin Drum:

But if a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, what do you call a conservative who's come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?

And my final favorite re-kookifying is actually a case of a kook making so much sense he makes his Party look positively kooky running away from him.

I used to fear Former Governor Mike Huckabee, who could still run away with the GOP Presidential nomination. Only now I think Huckabee would have to shuck even harder than he has to absorb Ron Paul's followers.

Rep. Paul (R-TX) is the bummer guest at the Republican Party's party, the guy who actually makes more sense on the Iraq War and its relationship to our U.S. Constitution than some of the Democratic candidates (Edwards and Dodd excepted). While you may not agree with Paul on this other Libertarian ideas (abolishing the IRS and Dept. of Education, cutting virtually all Federal regulations) they adhere to a consistent Constitutional approach, one that treats the Framers with a hell of a lot more respect and intellectual coherence than the Federalist Society cabal.

But looky here, Paul's campaign/supporters somehow organized up an excellent p.r. moment, when they all made their donations on Guy Fawkes day to the impressive tune of a $4.2MM one day haul. Nice work! The Guy Fawkes business has been criticized in relation to the British celebration -- capturing the man who was about to blow up Parliament -- but is really just an appropriate reference to graphic novel/movie V for Vendetta.

Kooky.

But already making the standard storyline Republicans kook-out in fear, trying to make you believe it's not really catching on.

The reality is that Rep. Paul's philosophy is very appealing and, I expect, will grow a following that may not even crest until 2012 or beyond. With the standard GOP philosophy discredited by all but the most hardcore ideologues or bloodsuckers, there's an opening for a concise, fiscally conservative, pro-habeas corpus, non-interventionalist philosophy. I wouldn't be surprised if Paul isn't a force at the Republican Convention -- maybe even winning a few states.

Will a Democratic candidate evince a consistent and succinct enough philosophy to lock in a win for this next Presidential election?

If I were one of them, I'd take a cue from Rep. Paul and start here.