'The Honeymooners' and Beckett

by Pat Higgins

When life is not extraordinary, it is rather ordinary. No, it is necessary to go further than that—for many people, life is mundane, a daily routine as tedious as the many routines that exist within it, but this is a reality (stark or precious, depending on whether one is the half-full type or not) that is not often conveyed in TV Land. It is interesting that the most scintillating exception dates all the way back to the 1950’s. This exception is fraught with familiar images and sounds, old reliable stand-bys from the Golden Era, such as the immortal lines the exasperated husband, Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason), utters when the wife, Alice (Audrey Meadows), has got him verbally beat: “To the moon, Alice, to the moon!” This mantra is such a pop-culture fixture that it would be remiss to mention it without following right up with the mention of its companion line: “You’re a regular riot, Alice, you’re a regular riot!” (To prove the stability of these moments as pop culture touchstones, one needs only to observe similar wife-husband dynamics present in more recent shows such as Home Improvement and The King of Queens.) These utterances rear their heads in the midst of seemingly inconsequential squabbles that come in between life’s more boring obligations. For Ralph, the biggest of such obligations is his job as a city bus driver; for Alice, it is, sadly, sitting around in a two-room Benson Hurst apartment waiting for Ralph to get home. For Ralph and Alice, the squabbles seem designed to break up the monotony of their lives, even though, probably unbeknownst to the couple, the squabbles are in themselves monotonous, thoughtless non-vicissitudes that are ruled by the dictates of pure habit.

The title of the show, The Honeymooners, is a scorching and (most likely) consciously-wrought irony—Ralph and Alice do very little traveling; in fact, they very rarely get out of their austere apartment throughout the duration of the show (a meager 39 episodes), with their various arguments and misunderstandings and tribulations, from minor to major, confined to the same modest room, which is comprised of a sink, a refrigerator, a dresser, a dining room table, and window that reveals a decidedly artificial backdrop of Brooklyn escape staircases. Given the economical approach, it is easy why The Honeymooners’ producers (Jack Hurdle, Jack Philbin, and Stanley Poss) decided to record the show weekly on a sound stage in front of a studio audience, as its aesthetic is actually more conducive to the stage than the small screens of televisions. The Honeymooners was actually a mild success during its initial run, having reached the number-two spot in the ratings at one point, although it was canceled after one just one season due to several contributing factors, the most salient of which being the writers’ complaint to Gleason that they were running out of ideas. But it is amazing that the show had any popular success at all considering the general restraint of both its physical and narrative aspects. The audiences at the time (1955-56) probably had little idea that they were watching a show that, directly or indirectly, took its chief influence from a relatively obscure and difficult avant-garde writer from Ireland named Samuel Beckett.

Among the key works of Beckett is Waiting for Godot, which each are considered to be seminal works in modernism, adding to the aggregate impact of the career of the artist often referred to as “the Last Modernist.” Merely being placed under the Modernist heading would be complimentary enough to Beckett, as it puts him on a diverse and impressive list of authors that includes Mikhail Bulgakov, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, among many others. But Beckett’s noted moniker implies a level of greatness and historical importance formidable enough to, in a qualitative sense, propel the old Irish savant’s works over and above those of his canonical colleagues. The real kicker is that Beckett was directly influenced by his fellow Irishman, James Joyce, who was in many ways the key Modernist writer of the 20th century. Beckett and Joyce met each other for the first time in Paris, 1926, and an apprenticeship ensued, with the 23 year-old Beckett serving as the protégé. The relationship was a unique one. Anthony Cronin describes it in his aptly titled Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist as a matter of two very different kinds of geniuses learning from each other. Cronin notes that Joyce suggested to Beckett that he write a critical symposium on Joyce’s Work in Progress. Beckett took Joyce up on the suggestion, but Cronin crucially notes that “that Beckett was compliant does not suggest any sycophancy on his part.” So it goes that Beckett had some Joyce in him and The Honeymooners has some Beckett in it. Therefore, The Honeymooners has some Joyce in it (i.e. leisurely humans and confused interactions). But, just as Beckett is at the same time radically different from Joyce, The Honeymooners is radically different from Beckett. Where does the relationship between Beckett and The Honeymooners exist? The best place to start (and probably end, although only after circular investigation) is to note Waiting for Godot’s likeness to The Honeymooners. They share two main things: a) confinement to an oppressive small space that the characters seem unable to break free from for any significant amount of time and b) an emphasis on the exalting power of banal, pointless chit-chat as a means of temporary escape from the platitudes of life. Instead of Ralph and Alice, Waiting for Godot features Vladimir and Estragon, two men who arrive at a nondescript location and wait for a mysterious figure named “Godot.” The fact that Godot never shows up is integral to the play’s existentialist leanings, its insistence on the ideological futility of life—which is not the same thing as futility per se—that renders all experiences inherently absurd. Soon after the start of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are established as tragic-comic victims of a waiting game they know preciously little about. In fact, the two characters have to constantly remind each other about why they are where they are and what they are doing there (towards the end of the play: “Estragon: Let’s go.” “Vladimir: We can’t.” “Estragon: Why not?” “Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.”). What’s more, it comes as a revelation to the two fellows every time they come up with some way to “pass the time” (at one point Vladimir gives Estragon some advice that makes little logical sense and when Estragon asks for clarification as to whether the advice will be productive or not, Vladimir simply says, “It’ll pass the time”) and life is established as the ultimate waiting game when Vladimir announces out of relief prompted by the arrival of a third character that he and his comrade “are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Godot, waiting for…waiting.”

Vladimir and Estragon’s aimlessness is not the only thing that makes them the fictional antecedents to Ralph and Alice—Beckett’s duo are in fact lovable, bumbling fools, their various conversational confusions and miscommunications comically inspired in much the same way. They even exhibit traits normally exclusive to lovers such as the Honeymooners couple. Some examples: when Vladimir expresses pain while getting his boots taken off, (his lover?) Estragon asks him if it hurts, leading Vladimir to answer with the sarcastic, speaking-to-an-invisible-audience manner that Ralph Kramden would later adopt—“Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!” And the snappy responses that Estragon hits Vladimir with sound much like they could have been delivered by Alice to her husband, i.e. when Vladimir says “It’s always at nightfall,” Estragon responds with “But night doesn’t fall!” Perhaps the most effulgent—and hilarious—parallel between the two sets of characters is embodied in Estragon’s vocally-expressed desire for a honeymoon: “The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.” But, like Ralph and Alice after them, Vladimir and Estragon never end up going anywhere. They simply wait for Godot.

The most simplistic analysis of Waiting for Godot would have “Godot” as Death’s doppelganger or stand-in, but the whole point of Waiting for Godot, and The Honeymooners, is that the characters, or—put more broadly—life’s inhabitants, have found a way to make “waiting” more bearable through digressions. The most worthwhile and entertaining of those digressions are other people, or outsiders. Vladimir and Estragon are visited twice by a pair (their names Pozzo and Lucky) whose antics in some ways mirror their own. Likewise, Ralph and Alice frequently receive affable visits from a couple (their names Ed and Tracy Norton) living on the floor above them. Predictably, Ed is to Ralph as Alice is to Tracy, with the male being the dim-witted brunt of the female’s acerbic humor. But, at least superficially, Ed Norton is even more buffoonish in his behavior than Ralph Kramden, as he speaks his words with a mopey drawl and walks around with clunky, uncoordinated steps (his entrances into Ralph’s apartment might have been a central inspiration for Kramer’s similar routines in Seinfeld; Albert Auster, in his essay “Much Ado About Nothing: Some Final Thoughts on Seinfeld, points this similarity out: “Nothing, except perhaps Ed Norton’s [Art Carney] balletic arrivals at Ralph and Alice’s apartment in The Honeymooners, compared to the whirling entrances of Kramer into Jerry’s apartment to serve himself a bowl of cereal, or inform Jerry of his latest scheme…”). Interestingly, the Lucky character in Waiting for Godot—in many ways Ed’s fictional antecedent—is perceivably stupid, evidenced by his or her ostensible inability to say anything coherent. Lucky’s stupidity is so blatant and extreme that a typical reader who has never seen the play performed may assume that he or she is a mule, or some other kind of serf-like animal, rather than a human. It might not be too far-fetched to assume that Beckett intentionally makes these implications, for Pozzo does go as far as to call Lucky a “creature” that needs to be “kicked in the arse,” an action that can be justified because “a dog has more dignity.” But Lucky eventually speaks, and what he or she says is either exceedingly gorgeous spoken-word poetry or complete gibberish (it’s really one for the audience to decide). Among the key phrases uttered by Lucky are quizzical aphorisms such as “exceptions for reason unknown but time will tell” and “who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still” and “man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes pines and wastes and pines.” Norton’s exaggerated movements are similarly animal-like, and he too has his moments of intellectual grace, spouting jokes that make reference to figures as diverse as General Custer and Clark Gable. Strangely, Norton’s jokes, like Lucky’s rant, often go over the heads of the more “respectable” characters surrounding him.

Economics is the underlying factor that drives the discursive mode of conversation present in both Waiting for Godot and The Honeymooners. The synopsis on the back cover of Grove Atlantic version of Waiting for Godot states that Vladimir and Estragon are “seemingly homeless men.” This conclusion can be drawn rather easily, as these two characters are men who apparently have nothing to do and nowhere to go. A way of staging Waiting for Godot that has grown in popularity since 1952 has all the principal characters remaining idle in trash cans throughout the play’s duration (an inspiration for the character of Oscar the Grouch, perhaps?), an approach that makes full use of the received wisdom that the two leads are unkempt vagrants. The Kramdens, while not quite homeless, are a struggling working-class couple probably unable to support children. Many episodes of The Honeymooners revolve around the economics of their situation, with Alice often pining for new household items and Ralph responding by saying they can’t afford it (although, in one of the show’s recurring jokes, Ralph has his bowling ball and is apparently able to afford innumerable nights out at the bowling lanes with Ed). The setting offered something for the working- and middle-class viewers of the 50’s to relate to. In a deeply touching essay for Pif Magazine, Steve Heller connects various instances in The Honeymooners to the disappointments and arguments and moments of joy encountered in his own childhood. One of the most salient things that Heller points out is the show’s milieu: “Maybe what I really recognize is the one-determined-step-above-poverty reflected in the fierce austerity of the Kramdens’ apartment, which Alice labors so relentlessly to keep running, the home that would be so much homier, if only she and Ralph had a TV. Or an electric stove. Or a refrigerator. Or a child.” The very first episode of the show (“TV or Not TV”) is predicated on a squabble that develops between Ralph and Alice: to buy a TV or not to buy a TV? In the world of The Honeymooners, such is an example of what might be the question, and Ralph answers it with a negative, ever true to his habit of being stringent with what little means he and his wife have, and Alice answers it the opposite way, insisting that she needs something to make her days more interesting. When they do eventually get a TV, it upends the order of their household rather drastically, with Ralph frequently falling asleep in front of it while seated in a hard-wood chair in the kitchen (where they have put the television). In the next episode, they no longer have the TV, leading one to the conclusion that they have already grown weary of it. In a sense, they have moved on to the next petty dilemma, which goes to show that the paradigm of problems created by their finances—the choices and realities of what they can buy and what they cannot—is just another distraction, a material one at that. This very American dilemma is analyzed further by David Steritt in his indispensible The Honeymooners (which provides just about everything one needs to know about the show): “In many Honeymooners episodes, Alice or occasionally Ralph is moved to lament the dinginess of their home and the forced austerity of their lives; in a word, they are discontented.” For Vladimir and Estragon and Ralph and Alice, the tactile problems are much easier to deal with than the larger, ultimately unavoidable (existential) ones. One remembers the short story carefully calibrated by the neurotic Isaac Davis of Woody Allen’s Manhattan: “An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who, uh, are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable terrifying problems about the universe. Well, it has to be optimistic.”

Both Waiting for Godot and The Honeymooners are, despite their dark digressions, almost romantically optimistic. In 1993, the late, great Susan Sontag staged a presentation of Waiting for Godot with the Youth Theater in Sarajevo when a sickening war fueled by the horrors of genocide was still taking place there. Imogen Carter wrote in The Observer that the event “drew so much attention to the city’s plight that many believe it helped end the war there.” There is really little doubt that the chosen play had a little something to do with it, for only by laughing at life’s inherent impenetrability will one be able to truly be happy. This was most likely the eternal message Sontag was harnessing and projecting. Perhaps it goes without saying that she would have done just as well with Ralph and Alice Kramden as her characters-at-hand.

The notion of a filmmaker dogmatically declaring himself to be "the greatest director in the world" at a renowned international film festival is an absurd one, mainly because said filmmaker is making a conscious decision to undermine and discredit himself--after all, his film-at-hand will eventually be seen by the world, and audiences will probably respond unfavorably to being played like fiddles by a director who is more obsessed with the media than his craft. This explains why it is really no shock that Lars von Trier's Antichrist is mediocre at best. However, some may still view it as a shock given the stir it caused at Cannes this past year, where oversensitive journalists and critics made it a point to squelch tears through press pages by way of whiny prose. That quote--"I am the greatest director in the world"--came from von Trier after an outraged reporter asked him to "justify" his movie. The obvious must be stated: if the reporter disliked the movie, he would have been better advised not to dissolve into panicked hysteria before the public's eyes while addressing a self-obsessed "enfant-terrible" (note the quotation marks).

Von Trier's remarks came as some of many at a Cannes better for film industry folklore than actual movies. As far as I'm concerned, there was one great film that premiered there (Inglourious Basterds), but even that one's reputation was unnecessarily tampered with by its maker's (Quentin Tarantino) histrionic declarations--i.e. "I make movies for the planet earth," a statement wrought with echos of von Trier's--of self-importance. But the sentiments of outspoken and bombastic artists cannot make the transformation into actual folklore without the permission and collusion of the press, which was the case with both Inglourious Basterds and Antichrist. The former elicited accusatory responses from some critics, one of whom (Jonathan Rosenbaum) ludicrously claimed it " feels morally akin to holocaust denial," while the latter--well, I think my leading paragraph makes clear enough the animosity generated against it. Trust critics to be even more solipsistic than directors, to think that movies were made to offend or elate or inspire or bore them, and only them. In other words, many critics seem unable to take a movie any way but personally.

But while the Tarantino film is surprisingly light on blood and heavy on love (love of cinema and its quieter moments and its too-frequently neglected femininity), the von Trier film's success is contingent upon its more visceral aspects. It has its moments of beauty--the opening sequence, which is in ravishing black-and-white, unfolds over a series of stops-and-starts that go back-and-forth between images of a married couple having sex and their child's impending death--interspersed throughout, but the power of such moments is usurped by the climax, a "brutal" succession of blood-letting and body mutilation that is responsible for the movie's "reputation" (yes, more quotation marks, because the entire movie seems to exist within quotation marks); by the time those infamous final twenty minutes are underway, everything that has come before seems to have faded into irrelevance and desperate gasp-getting seems to hijack the narrative.

I appreciated Larry Gross' article on Antichrist in Film Comment, for at least it looks at the film in a cool and sedate manner. Gross uses a lot of his allotted page space to tell other critics to chill the fuck out. He almost seems exhausted--not to mention frustrated--by the task, but he understands that he must do it, that it is necessary to remind the international film press that Antichrist is, well, just a film. Here's how the article starts: "There will be no thumbs up or down in this article. Antichrist is neither disgusting nor worthless, nor is it one of the great films. It is a transitional work made by an artist clearly in crisis, but not necessarily the psychological crisis he discussed at length in the press at Cannes." Such words come as a refreshing dose of reality, although I disagree with Gross' headline for the article, which proclaims von Trier to be a "great artist."

The "psychological crisis" that Gross is referring to is a bout of depression that von Trier claims motivated the making of the movie. To deal with human misery, the red glow of the soul that Ingmar Bergman used to explore, von Trier takes a page from the Don't Look Now book, where a married couple's mourning following the death of their child becomes representative of the deepest, blackest black hole of the human condition, or, as von Trier presents it in his film, "grief," "pain," and "despair," each represented visually by a fox, a deer, and a crow, not necessarily respectively. The couple is played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both excellent. Dafoe is benefited by his gaunt, skull-chiseled face, which he uses to convey a sly demonic quality, even when his character is striving to be benign, and Gainsbourg--whose excellent performance in I'm Not There was unfairly eclipsed by those of her (many) co-stars--by her bulky jaw and furious eyes.

Perhaps it is the way in which the Gainsbourg character deals with her loss--i.e. fucking, writhing around on hard bathroom tiles, banging her head against a merciless sink--that has garnered so many cries of "misogyny!" from critics, many of whom are still reeling from the shit von Trier dumped onto Bjork in Dancer in the Dark and Nicole Kidman in Dogville (Kidman once reportedly asked von Trier, "Why are you so evil to women?"). The Cannes "ecumenical" jury even went as far as to call it "the most misogynistic movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world," a statement that should be met with a sea of eye-rolls. The statement pretends that every damn director doesn't flirt with misogyny of some kind at one point or another--it may or may not be always apparent on the screen, but it's part of the job, folks, as is misandry (after all, the two characters' given names are "He" and "She"), and von Trier deals in both in Antichrist, a film that can actually be more accurately summed up as "misanthropic." The jury should have offered reasons as to why von Trier's misogyny is deeper than that of other directors. Did the jury insist that Antichrist is the"most"misogynistic simply because the Gainsbourg character does terrible things to her husband? I would like to think that an official Cannes council would not be so simplistic in their observations, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt--it would be a real shame if they did not notice the Dafoe character's vindictiveness, his compulsive need to keep his wife weak-willed and servile.

My problem with Antichrist stems from the fact that it is boring--I've seen far too many exploitation films to be appalled by von Trier's stunts. The final degeneration comes after several mock-therapy episodes at the couple's cabin (located deep within the bowels of a troubled, lugubrious, fog-soaked forest), the more interesting ones involving references to witchcraft, a concept von Trier seems to have picked up from a couple of earlier movies from his homeland (Denmark), Haxan and Day of Wrath (made by Carl Dreyer, purportedly von Trier's hero). It is the vague intimations of witchcraft and supernatural tomfoolery that barely qualifies Antichrist as the "horror" movie von Trier intended it to be.

Ah, fuck it--I'll just spill the goods here. What is so "shocking" about Antichrist? Gainsbourg slams a block of wood into Dafoe's penis and then proceeds to pull it out and jerk it off until it ejaculates blood all over her clothing. But that's not all--she then takes a power drill and drills a hole through Dafoe's leg and pokes the bar part of an iron weight through it and secures it there, forcing him to walk around with the thing dragging his leg down. But that's not all--some time later, when Dafoe is teetering on the verge of death, she grabs his limp hand and masturbates with it. But that's not all--she then grabs a pair a scissors and uses it to cut off her clitoris, an action that is indeed shown in close-up. The audience around me seemed to be mightily upset, with hard, frantic breaths being emitted from all directions, but I thought it was all too desperate, just flat out trying too hard, for it to be real and thus horrifying. For my money, von Trier had reverted back to the status of an annoying street-jester, a corner clown exhausting a very limited bag of tricks--yes, Lars, I've seen the rabbit-out-the-hat before--and telling me every time I was about to walk away, "No! Don't go! I swear I've got another one!"

So this is our modern day provocateur of the cinema, eh? In that case, one doesn't necessarily need to say that Luis Bunuel or Pier Paolo Pasolini are turning in their graves--saying that Sam Peckinpah, whose Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia conveys the inner core of human suffering much more acutely than von Trier's new film does, is spinning in his will do just fine.

Salvador Allende: A "Tyrant" Looking to Spread the Copper

Mary Anastasia O'Grady is using the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall to espouse the wrong kind of pro-capitalist screed. As one of the Wall Street Journal's vanilla Reaganites (come to think of it, nowadays there's hardly a writer for that paper who is anything but), she surely must have a more reasonable screed in her than the execrable one she published today, which is full of egregious lies and omissions and half-truths, from its first words ("Fidel Castro learned a lot from Chilean President Salvador Allende's failed power grab in 1973...") onward.

Who would really describe Allende's tenure as president of Chile (1970-1973) as a "power grab"? Well, besides O'Grady and her wild pack of Reagan-fiends? The record on Allende's presidency is quite clear: elected by 36.2% of Chile's voting population, Allende was not to be denied the presidency by a constitution (the same one that O'Grady references in her column) that guaranteed democratic rule. He was elected mainly by Chile's workers, who had full knowledge of his Marxism and its logical extensions, such as his intent to nationalize major Chilean industries.

The column's attempt to paint Allende as a "tyrant" is really just a swift rush of apologia for the U.S. government's involvement in the coup that led to the fallen president's suicide. O'Grady manages to bring up the Chilean House's Aug. 22, 1973, resolution (which decreed military action against Allende to be necessary) while neglecting to mention the Chilean Senate's response to it. She would have you believe that the coup was completely justified. It was "justified" by some, but the question "Justified by whom?" would be the corollary of such a statement. The answer to that question: the U.S. government, of course, which had obvious ideological problems with Allende, the kind that went far beyond the U.S.'s opposition to Cuba and the Soviet Union, for Allende's ties with the former menace were primarily defined by mere conviviality, while its ties to the latter were weak at best (when Allende visited the Soviet Union in an effort to obtain economic aid in 1973, he was turned down). There is no question that Chile's economy was suffering towards the end of Allende's tenure, but it is difficult to discern how much of that came as the result of sanctions enforced by the U.S. in response to Allende's decision to nationalize his country's copper industry.

The official documents delineating the U.S.'s--or, if you will, Henry Kissinger's--desired complicity in the coup de'tat are public, but O'Grady must be betting that her readers have not read them. She would have one believe that the 1973 military siege of the Palacio de La Moneda was a deliverance, pure and simple, but in order to believe her one would be required to forget about that terrible Franco-esque dictator who ruled Chile soon after, General Pinochet, a fascist cretin propped up by an acquiescent United States government that just wanted the anti-profit Allende out of the picture. O'Grady herself meets such a requirement by practicing willful amnesia--there is no mention at all of Pinochet in her column. For the record, the nature of Pinochet's reign was abominable--after starting out, as Hugo Fruhling makes clear, with the "use of force...unlimited" and "highly irregular," it ended with a "progressive legal institutionalization of the use of force."

Allende's suicide made clear that he was far from a perfect man and leader. In a moment of harrowing duress, when the crowds were roaring and the feet were trampling and the guns were aimed, he was unable to endure. But it is wrong for O'Grady to describe Allende's final demise as if it was comparable to Stalin's, or anybody of that dictatorial ilk. Allende's final speech, delivered via radio broadcast, is one of the most moving pieces of political oratory of the 1970's, a paean to a dying set of ideals imbued with remarkable--and chilling--prescience, a chunk of world history condensed into a mournful roar of hope (a false one from Allende's standpoint, alas), one that gains the resonance of genuine elegy when the full extent of the elucidation provided by hindsight is considered ("I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours..."). And perhaps it should be noted that Allende had a capacity for truth-telling. One of his best moments came later in his presidency when he was addressing a labor conference, where he was being booed for telling workers they would probably have to take wage cuts. His response to the jeers: "I didn't come here to be hissed or cheered. I came here to talk sense to you."

O'Grady words about Hugo Chavez can also be misleading, as she describes Chavez's presidency as "dictatorship under the guise of democracy." This could use a little explaining. Chavez first came to power in 1998 with a landslide victory in Venezuela's presidential election. Since then, the Venezuelan people's support for him has gone up and down and up again, and as of now he has a rather high approval rating. Chavistas remain a passionate bunch in Venezuela, a group mainly made up of the country's poor. If Chavez does what O'Grady fears and coaches El Salvador's President-elect, hopefully it will be in the art of magnanimity, so El Salvador's poor can get some relief. I should say that I am not the biggest fan of Chavez--he's a bit cuckoo, in a cute crazy uncle kind of way--but I know he isn't the Antichrist by any stretch of the imagination, and his feelings about America's people are quite favorable, as evidenced by his speech at the United Nations a few years back (it is too bad that the speech was marred by his loose-tongued, cockamamie insistence that Bush is the "devil").

It is interesting that the aforementioned quote from Allende ("I address the man of Chile," etc.) goes onto say that the "fascists" will be judged by history. That was the hope. But when history is in the hands of Mary Anastasia O'Grady, it is not the case.

Detroit City Council President-elect Charles Pugh

Yesterday's elections were bound to bring good news for Detroit no matter what the results. It is a wonderful notion when one considers it further--the only distinction to be made is between good news and better news.

The results didn't always bring the "better" news. I wish the man I interviewed for my last piece, John K. Bennett, had won a spot on city council. He certainly impressed me a bit more than, say, the elected James Tate, with whom I also had a personal encounter. Bennett floored me with his sheer command of the facts, his ability to rattle off statistics and illuminate neglected issues. But I suspected that Bennett's aridity could prevent him from gaining traction--he certainly didn't drip with classical charisma, although this was probably part of the reason I liked him. As a candidate, he was pure substance, and I hope he decides to run again next election cycle.

(I don't mean to knock Tate, for he's a very agreeable individual. But when I asked him for his thoughts on the details of Robert Bobb's public struggles regarding his looming decision on whether or not to cede Detroit Public Schools to the private sector, he admitted to having no knowledge whatsoever of the situation. He added that it was OK because it was out of his jurisdiction. To Tate's credit, he said he would research it. I suppose there's no way of really knowing whether or not he went home and hit the books after our conversation. But I'm still sure that, despite that moment, he'll do well on the city council.)

The supplantation of Ken Cockrel by Charles Pugh is a toss-up--Pugh doesn't have any substantial history in city government, but his dynamism has invigorated citizens like few local politicians I can think of. It's important to note that Pugh's sexual orientation ended up being a complete non-issue. One could certainly attribute symbolic importance to his victory in light of last year's much-controverted Prop. 8 of California, which brought about sinister whisperings about the "black" attitude towards homosexuality. The problems in California had everything to do with religion and nothing to do with race--really, why would it be any other way?--and this moment at least provides a decent riposte to every faux media tale that was concocted at the time.

And to add one point to the "better" side of things: the much-needed Proposal D was passed. So here's to Detroit and its people, so that they may finally get the government they deserve.

John K. Bennett has spent 13 years as a police officer for the city of Detroit. His experience has led him to the conclusion that the city needs to see some fundamental change. So it should come as no surprise that Bennett has decided to run for Detroit City Council.

“It’s a question of leadership,” Bennett says about the city’s problems. Leadership is something Bennett thinks he can provide.

Others concur. Bennett’s friend of 20 years, Harold Sullivan, says that Bennett can be described in one word: “Integrity.”

“John is perhaps one of the best non-incumbent candidates for quite some time,” says Sullivan, who met Bennett their mutual church, New Saint Paul Tabernacle, Church of God in Christ in Detroit. “Some people may see him as argumentative. That’s just because, when he believes in something, he will fight for it.”

Some Detroit citizens might know Bennett from Detroituncovered (originally called firejerryo), the website he launched in 2002 designed to expose corruption in the city government. The site cost him his job for five years; only recently has he been able to recover his old position at the police department. Detroituncovered is still up and running today.

Bennett believes his strained history with Kwame Kilpatrick qualifies him as being truly serious about addressing corruption in city government, an issue that all candidates claim to be concerned about. “They can talk about corruption all they want,” Bennett says. “But I was the only one in this race to go against Kilpatrick’s corruption.”

With Detroituncovered, Bennett found himself making extra effort to help the city he grew up in. He was raised in Detroit as the youngest of 11 children. His father, Wilbert Bennett, was a truck driver, and his mother, Susie Bennett, stayed at home and took care of the kids.

Bennett went on to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Affairs from Wayne State University and a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Eastern Michigan. He says that both degrees suited him well.

He also cherishes his past as a police officer as Detroit, an experience that he claims informed his understanding of Detroit’s government. “It was like [Detroit] Government 101,” he says.

Bennett is spending most of his time discussing the things that city council members have jurisdiction over—the city budget, the city charter, and contracts.

His plans for the city budget: “We need to streamline our government. Overpaying must stop. There will be pay cuts that are necessary in wages.”

But Bennett is perplexed by the overwhelming attention that the idea of worker pay cuts receives. He thinks there’s a flipside to that coin—the city must start discussing new ways to bring in revenue.

One idea Bennett has is to make use of vacant land. He believes the land must be marketed to developers. An example he cites: a new battery plants on the east side could provide up to 300 new jobs.

Another idea Bennett has relates directly to another problem Detroit is facing—blight. “There are 48 abandoned buildings downtown,” Bennett says. ‘This is hugely connected to crime in the city and how people view the city.”

He believes that it’s time to hold individuals, companies, and banks accountable for their property. They must either pay taxes on their respective properties or sell them. This can serve as a stone capable of killing more than one figurative bird; it can bring in revenue while improving the city’s aesthetic value.

As for the city charter, Bennett advocates charter revisions, such as the council by district initiative (this is now known as Proposal D and will be featured on this year’s ballot) and a stronger ethics ordinance. He also believes that city council should have some say as to whom appointees report.

And then there is the issue that relates most directly to Bennett’s past experience—combating crime. He does have some law enforcement figures endorsing him, perhaps most notably Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who said that “the people of Detroit have a person they can trust to represent them well with Bennett as we continue to transition to new leadership in this city.” Sgt. Rodney Cox of the Detroit Police Department describes Bennett as a “big brother” and “mentor” and says that he “would make a great city councilman. He remains focused and undaunted in face of great tasks.”

Although the FBI’s numbers for Detroit decreased slightly last year—to be exact, the list showed a 1.9 percent decrease in violent crimes and 0.8 percent decrease in property crimes—it still remains a serious problem in Detroit. Those very statistics showed 306 murders having been committed in the year 2008, and that number has even been hotly contested by the Detroit Police Department as being severely under the mark.

“There needs to be more officers on the street,” Bennett says. “There are between 1,500 and 2,000 officers that were laid off that have not been replaced. There are even 300 budgeted positions that aren’t filled.”

Bennett claims that the best way to begin filling this disparity is with simple accountability. He says he will make it his job to ensure that the department is using its allocated dollars towards personnel.

Bennett thinks there are other ways to combat crime beyond the police department, one of them relating to the third thing city council has jurisdiction over (contracts). He thinks there is plenty to be done within the neighborhoods, and the city council can play a part by being more thoughtful about what licenses it dolls out to business owners. More specifically, he thinks there are too many topless bars (about 40, he says) in the city.

“We should do things with families in mind,” Bennett says. “It’s a quality of life issue, (topless bars) along with party stores and liquor stores. We shouldn’t have a poor man’s mentality.”

The nature of Bennett’s continued commitment to Detroit will be decided on November 3rd, when Detroit elects and transitions to what will in many ways be a new government. Voters can find out more about Bennett at his campaign website, http://www.bennettfordetroit.com/.

Michael Moore: It's never easy to put a demagogue's face at the top of your blog.

The filmic methods of Capitalism: A Love Story have Michael Moore at his cheapest and most obnoxious. He is indeed the liberal Rush Limbaugh, but Moore's cheapness and obnoxiousness are self-evident. As a result critics tend to scrutinize his approach while letting his amorphous arguments slip through the cracks, but the more his invective is thoroughly examined, the more evident it is that he is, devastatingly, a rebel desperately in need of a clearer cause.

While it isn't quite a terrible film, Capitalism has little capacity for effectiveness, as its creator is simply bent on equivocation. I'm not sure what Moore likes to call himself (certainly "filmmaker" is too vague a label), but hopefully "polemicist" is not among his preferred avowals--for starters, a polemicist must know with certitude what he or she is arguing for. With Capitalism, audiences are faced with a 140-minute movie that never clearly defines "capitalism." This is what ultimately undoes his innocuous little movie, for capitalism, if Marx was correct, just might be the greatest tragic drama of the century, and a history lesson is greatly needed in order to more completely understand the sinister fluctuations and cruel repercussions that move and shake it in its present form.

To be fair, Moore knows what he is arguing against, and that is the human defect commonly called "greed." It must be said that by the end of the film I simply wanted to ask Moore what he has already been asked (and failed to adequately answer): What does this have to do with capitalism? The old claim that the capitalists are "vampires" is outdated, for the capitalists make up on the majority of the country, in ways that go beyond mere practice.

The question of greed is almost addressed early on in the film's most thematically refreshing sequence, where Moore attempts to dispel the Myth of Ronald Reagan. (It is a relief to see the Gipper finally put in his place.) This is where the primary negative symptoms of a gung-ho free-market attitude--things such as tax breaks for the richest Americans leading to the disbandment of the unions and the dissembling of the middle class--are mentioned. But that's it--they're mentioned. The brevity and breeziness of this sequence becomes problematic when Moore is, towards the end of the film, finally confronted with explaining the bailouts of 2008. Bailing out the banks was a notion that ran contrary to the principles of both the free-market and the state-planned economy (which would have required full-fledged nationalization), and it is here that Moore gets his knickers a bit twisted.

Actually, explaining Moore's ostensible bemusement when it comes to political economy need not stop there. Also at the top of his show are warm childhood reminiscences of capitalism delivered by the director's token "sweet voice," where he panders to what he percieves to be the audience's own prejudices and inclinations. Moore describes being raised in a middle class environment where life was about getting by with the things you need, not necessarily the things you want. At this time, he claims, the richest people in the country "had to pay a top tax rate of 90 percent," and as a result average workers were able to obtain the things necessary for them and their families. But if this was capitalism, what does that make the system that America has today? A conflation of big business and government is actually more Communistic (in the New China sense of the word; America is waltzing down this depressing road, even if it doesn't necessarily tally up the human rights violations of that country) than purely capitalistic, and it creates similar results--the emergence of an elite class that lords over the working masses, a new bourgeoisie so to speak.

(The socialist left has actually found itself haplessly--and, to be sure, unsuspectingly--stepping into this treacherous quick sand rather often as of late; an example would be Naomi Klein, on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, insisting to Andrew Sullivan that his argument about the bailouts [being anti-free market] is akin to the old drum beat of modern radicals, which states that the Soviet Union wasn't "real" socialism. This is basically Klein working to obfuscate the issue at the expense of the main tenant of her entire philosophy and worldview. Not good.)

See, Moore doesn't argue for Keynesian policies or increased regulations. He makes it clear at the end of the film that he thinks "capitalism" itself is "evil," an adjective that is especially noisome considering he borrows it from a couple of choice priests. Jesus is brought into the fray more than a couple times in the film to decry capitalism as a "sin." We've been hearing this mantra from Moore a lot lately. I suspect his insistence on piety--which provides him with intellectual refuge every time he starts to sweat--has a lot to do with the tenuousness of his grasp on political economy. How offensive it is that Moore, a supposed "progressive," insists on calling America a "Judeo-Christian" country before he goes on to name-drop a few more religions, regarding their respective belief systems as all the proof one needs. He neglects to even mention non-believers, those who are sick of hearing distant "prophets" of the past, from Jesus to Muhammad, treated as criterions. I guess atheists and antitheists and agnostics will have to do without Moore's help--which is, come to think of it, perhaps all for the better.

A few more contradictory moments come along when Barack Obama enters the picture. Moore, with his typical sassy intonation, says "holy shit" on a voice-over accompanying footage of Obama inspring mass crowds, intimating that Wall Street was shaking in its loafers at the prospect of an Obama presidency. Moore then expresses umbrage towards Goldman Sachs for their contributions to Obama's campaign, enraged at what he perceives as a private corporation trying to purchase a candidate. But he sidesteps the biggest part, which is that Obama reneged on a major campaign promise and accepted the contributions. Obviously fear evaporated from the hearts, minds, and stomachs of Goldman Sachs pretty quick once they realize that all they were faced with was a new name to make the check out to.

When socialism is formally mentioned, it is in the context of the fatuous allegations towards Barack Obama made by Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Here Moore's voracious support of Obama gets flat out confusing--he scoffs at the accusations as "fear-mongering," and then asks what socialism really is, all this before having Bernie Sanders defend social democracy. (He also, for no apparent constructive reason, cites a poll about the youth and socialism; for what it's worth, his wording is deceptive.) So the questions grow exponentially: Does Moore actually think Obama is a socialist or a capitalist? And if the president isn't a socialist, why does Moore insist on defending him while at the same time making half-hearted concessions towards the legitimacy of social democracy? (A "for your information" bit: Accusing Obama of being a socialist is radically ridiculous. Robert Jensen did a fine job of explaining why this is in an article for CounterPunch. There is one obvious question that I derived from the piece. How can any administration that counts people like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers amongst its own ever be accused of socialism?)

And so the audience is left to take temerarious stabs in the dark as to what Moore is advocating. He doesn't dare call himself a socialist, and one wonders if this is because he's scared of the flack he would get. If this is true, it is disconcerting--flack has never held Moore back before, and it would prove that "socialist" is a term in America considered pejorative beyond reason. Perhaps the hysteria of Palin, Plumber, & Company is enough proof. Regardless, it must be remembered that America is in a minority in not having a major socialist party. Some places still have the socialists winning (e.g. the recent victory of the Pasok Party in Greece, a center-left party that openly refers to itself as "socialist").

Moore's film is thus credible as an expression of vigorous outrage, but it isn't cogent as an argument. So I will, in a few paragraphs, attempt to pick up Moore's slack. If the film intended to repudiate the free market, it would have been better for it to explain what ailed the Hong Kong economy of the 90's. A onetime laissez-faire capitalist's dream city, Hong Kong's economy shriveled into a deep recession in the late 90's when the economies of its interdependent neighbors--Japan being the biggest one--collapsed. Hong Kong was then made vulnerable to various hedge funds, which devised ways to make money off a faltering stock market.

If Moore wished to criticise the current American model, he'd be advised call it what it is: cronyism. And cronyism is what the Reagan Cult has defended for years in the name of capitalism. But it actually sees, as I mentioned before, Big Business working in collusion with government. When the government decides to bail out major institutions, it is actually seeking to maintain the cronyist status quo, for if major institutions such as AIG and Bank of America collapse, a system dramatically different will undoubtedly have to emerge.

(Moore would be correct if he was to assert that "cronyism" is reflective of the (im?)moral international victory capitalism has won over socialism. He would be correct if he said that cronyism is reflective of the general attitude of held by genuine capitalists--that there are predators and there are prey, and that's just how it goes.Too bad for Michael--and his movie--that he said no such thing.)

And then there's the importance of explaining why capitalism, in any form, is unsustainable. In order for it to survive, capitalism must remain in flux and growing. Marxist geographer David Harvey points out that, as an economic system, capitalism has grown at a 2.5 compound rate of growth since 1750. There must be an eventual limit to growth--to quote Harvey directly--"environmentally, socially, politically." In order to avert the complete free-fall into the abyss, a new system must emerge, an economy that emphasizes human need instead of profit. This would require a society owned by the wage-earning masses, a society where issues like public transit and health have long since ceased to be controverted. A sneak-peek into this light is offered in Capitalism's most useful sequences, which show that the ideal of the worker-controlled workplace need not be an ideal. (Among the moments highlighted is the wondrous Chicago sit-in from last year, where the work force of Republic Windows and Doors decided to take matters into their own hands and test the sincerity of the company's name.)

Unfortunately, the real truths of these dilemmas aren't made explicitly clear in Capitalism. At the end of the film, Moore proposes that "democracy" replace "capitalism." Um. What? I couldn't help but wonder, Is this guy even still involved in the discussion he started? The statement seems akin to getting told that exercise is good after asking for tips on a healthy diet. The film is clearly a bit low on ideas (and historical research on the subject of political economy), but perhaps it's best for people to do research on their own account and come to their own conclusions anyway.

A Few Thoughts On the Arrest of Roman Polanski

Before I make a go of this, I'd like to get a couple preliminaries out of the way--

1. From Repulsion to Rosemary's Baby to Chinatown to The Tenant, Roman Polanski has certainly made his share of great films. But, in attempting a fair-minded examination of this incendiary situation, I have tried my best to eradicate them from mental framework.

2. I think rape is contemptible and loathsome. I hope that is enough to qualify me as at least vaguely human.

Now, let's get to it. Over the past couple of days I've become increasingly troubled by the attitudes of some of those who wish to see Polanski extradited. But before I get into that, let me say that this has forced me to think long and hard about what consequences should befall a convicted rapist. Truth be told, I toyed with some rather dubious scenarios. Well, we could take that knife from Chinatown and split his nostril for real, and then after an old-fashioned flouting and beating we can have him publicly raped himself... These are the types of thoughts one inevitably has in passing that aren't meant to be expressed aloud. But wait! That's where the internet comes in. Moments after my lurid daydreams, I came across this comment by one "mahkara" in the comments section of a Double X article by Jessica Grose:

"I'm sorry, but the bastard deserves MORE than 30 years. IMHO, he deserves EXACTLY what he did to that poor girl - to be anally raped (yes, if you're defending him, he did that to his victim) by a very large, burly man in a maximum security prison...for I suppose the duration of his sentence."

Whoa, I say. But this could be an anomaly, you say. But it isn't--moments after stumbling upon that post, I found one saying that he is "worthy of death" (whatever that means). And then I found yet more like it.

The internet, a safe-haven for anonymous bigmouths to say whatever they want about whatever they want, is certainly the best place to look if one wishes to surmise the prevailing attitudes of the general public. All bets are off, and that is especially true of the comment sections of blogs. It appears that the majority of commenters are against Polanski and his Hollywood co-signers (including Scorsese, Lynch, Allen, etc., all of whom have yet to offer explanations). Which would be fine if there weren't so many moralizing platitudes being uttered that are meant to denegrate those with sympathies and/or questions. For instance, I do think Samantha Geimer's opinions on the situation should be taken into account. The question there is, was Polanski's crime first and foremost against society or against Geimer? I vouch for the latter, although precedent must certainly be set when it comes to child rapists. And I am also wary about the timing--Polanski has meandered about Switzerland with impunity over the past 31 years and could have been arrested at any time. It must be confirmed that Polanski's arrest was not a political ploy in order for his extradition to be effective or constructive. A legal system designed solely to punish might be fitful for the fun revenge fantasies one might encounter at the movies (perhaps even Polanski's), but it is bad for real life and bad for a republic. If Polanski is extradited, I hope he can avoid the morbid fate that is being projected onto him by the more vengeful imaginations that are dominating internet discourse.

Alexander Cockburn wrote an article at CounterPunch on the topic that is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to admit one central fact--Polanski is guilty of rape. This can not be disputed. But I do appreciate that the article vindicates my concerns about the general public's attitudes. For my money, the original hearing was tainted by media, or at least by a judge who was responding to media hype, and I think it would be more constructive for those who wish to see Polanski in jail to a) not gleefully indulge in prison-style rape fantasies, and b) for those who don't engage in such madness, to call out those who do. People may or may not realize it, but the prospect of a pedophile being beaten and raped in jail is a very real one, and while pedophiles may deserve to be locked up for a lifetime, they also deserve not to undergo cruel and unusual punishment (as our Constitution would have it). People are very right when they point out that it is Polanski's fame that has saved from jail time for many years. It is shameful that this is the case, although anybody capable of escaping a lifetime of unwanted stabs at their fannies might employ said capabilities. This still relates to the bigger question I was asking--do people seek to punish the wrongdoer or provide solace to the victim/prevent future wrongdoings? This is why I find it important to, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, "take into account" the agreements made in 1977. Doing such may not protect Polanski from more jail time, but it would certainly provide less of an emotional hassle for grown-up victim.

Let's take things back to the concept of discourse. Author Ted Stanger recently said, "To the American mind, [Polanski] is proof that nobody is above the law." If that's the case, we could use some better proof. I'm not against Polanski's extradition, or his seeing jail time, provided he sees a fair sentencing. Whatever "fair" means, I am not entirely sure--I just know that high-profile media cases rarely exhibit it. It'd be great to see our legal system mean something again. But the priorities of America at the moment make this feel rather silly. How about some bigger game first, or even concurrently? How about charges of war crimes against men who ordered the pre-emptive invasion a country and suspended habeus corpus and ordered torture based on erroneous readings of the Geneva Conventions? No, not even serious discourse dedicated to the subject, and those who cried foul could expect to be labeled google-eyed radicals (assuming they aren't self-proclaimed ones like me). I'm not surprised; a victimized 13-year-old girl certainly provides some ghastly imagery in the minds of parents, and some level of outrage on these things is undoubtedly healthy as long as it isn't downright vengeful. But apparently casket-bound troops and slaughtered Iraqis just don't do it for the American public these days like this stuff does. Alas--the makings of a crumbling republic. Or should that be "crumbled"?

The polar opposite view of the one I previously chastised is two things: a) even more ridiculous, and b) more philosophically interesting. The viewpoint can be seen in its epitomical form here, where Harvey Weinstein fails to distinguish between a man and his art. He is playing the same kind of role Al Sharpton did during the Michael Jackson frenzy. However, something tells me it will be harder to portray Polanski as a worthy object of idolatry than it was Jackson. (This is my second Weinstein knock in one month; I am certainly squelching my chances of a career in Hollywood, but oh well.)

Weinstein's philosophy is not a new one. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about a new moral order that posited things such as wealth and power as the most crucial attainments in life. But a society of nihilists will inevitably collapse (sadly, this ugly truth has become more and more apparent for the American economic system over the past year). Fydor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment features a character (Raskolnikov) who is convinced he is amongst a special class of people, a class that is smarter and more creative and ultimately superior to the rest of mankind. For these people, laughable notions such as "morals" and "ethics" simply don't apply. But the rub lies in the class's exclusivity. The detective Porfiry Petrovich asks Raskolnikov how one can be totally sure that he or she truly qualifies for this exclusive class. Raskolnikov's narcissistic answer is as follows:

"People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so in fact. One thing only is clear, that the appearance of all these grades and subdivisions of men must follow with unfailing regularity some laws of nature. That law, of course, is unknown at present, but I am convinced that it exists, and one day may become known. The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence. One in ten thousand perhaps--I speak roughly, approximately--is born with some independence, and with still greater independence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions. In fact I have not peeped into the retort in which all this takes place. But there certainly is and must be a definite law, it cannot be a matter of chance."

The validity of Raskolnikov's retort is still pending, and I suspect it always will be--a "definite law" has not been empirically proven to exist (although most people seem to have been naturally infused with a general understanding of right and wrong, i.e. murder is wrong, etc.). In fact, our standard laws still essentially rely on a kind of common sense, even if religion--fueled by antiquated reasoning--sometimes dilutes the progress of ethics. But I'm pretty sure that contemporary America's version of "common sense" includes the fundamental wrongness of rape, which is a violation of somebody's most sancrosact--to specify, tactile--areas. The reasoning for this type of common sense can be arrived at intellectually, if not empirically. It does not take heavy thinking to conclude that human progress is more impressive when it unfolds communally, which is partially why it is called "human" progress in the first place, as opposed to "individual" progress. In order for the human commune to flourish, people must respect one another's livelihoods.

Weinstein would have you believe that Polanski belongs to the elite class. The problem is, the answer to Petrovich's question will always remain susceptible to subjectivity. But, if nothing else, Weinstein's article just reveals some very disturbing things about how Hollywood views the rest of the country.

(Final note: another great introspection of this theme can be found in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, which features Jimmy Stewart as a civilized college professor who writes a thesis on the elite class. A few of his students take the thesis way too literally.)