Putting the Con in "Icon"

Blowing through O'Hare Airport a couple weeks ago, my attention was drawn to the cover of Time magazine, that old bastion of Luce and vanitas, and its depiction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the rubbed-out poster boy for jihad. His head, and only his head, floated in the frame of the cover, with a red X, rendered in a bloody ink wash, crossed over it.

Man, if anything could put the spring in the step of your chunky, hard-charging business travelers, the fat heads who prowl the nation's skyways in pursuit of deals big and small, it was that. (I may be wrong, but if you are looking for the demographic that benefits the most from the War Party's policies, it is on display every day, coursing through our air hubs.) There was something familiar about the Zarqawi X which took me about five seconds to place; another Time magazine cover from the past's dim mists.

Hitler, May, 1945. And, as The Raw Story reminded me Saddam Hussein as well.

Jesus, if ever we needed hard evidence of the trivializing of the national will, a cheapening of the narrative, this is bloody well it. In sixty years we have gone from a nation of modest farmers and mechanics who worked without rest, or much recompense, to free the world from militant fascist regimes, to a strutting power-mad country of "service providers" which conflates in its popular mind, in its media eye, the summary execution of murderous creeps with lasting strategic victory.

Not living in New York, I missed another popular conflation of a head shot, on the front page of Murdock's Post; the image of the so-called Marlboro Man. Where some wished to see in it a gritty, determined dogface, hard set on booting Jerry back to Berlin, excuse me, beating Haji out of Baghdad, others saw a heartbreaking example of what came to be known during WW2 as the hundred-yard stare.

And sure enough, the poor bastard admitted months afterward to some form of PTSD, and this week came news that his marriage imploded after, oh, about six weeks.

Lately the War Party has had to scream louder as it accomplishes less and less. The anger being directed at the NY Times for its story on the government surveillance of financial records, is being used to distract from three pieces related to one another which reflect very badly indeed on the fools in power: A) The recent Baghdad "security crackdown" has been fruitless so far; B) General Casey suggested a timeline for withdrawal and C) The Iraqi PM has offered Sunni and other insurgents an amnesty deal, which they seem willing to accept - at this stage - if it is coupled with a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

My advice to the jerks in power is to take the amnesty deal and clear out. It is the best one that they will ever have.

They won't, of course. They will fuck it up like they have fucked up every other thing they have put their dirty, greedy and numb hands on. In the meantime they will offer up more stupid icons of imagined victory for the people to take to their hearts, only now the hearts are filling with sorrow, disgust and anger at the War Party which no bossy images can hope to scatter.

The Times a' Changin'?

After taking the NY Times to task yesterday, I feel, in the light of fairness, to call attention to a piece in there today which - for the most part - understands the new media dynamic. Funny enough it is not on the op-ed page, or in any of the culture coverage, rather hidden in plain sight on the front page of the Business section.

David Carr's Cascading Inconvenient Truths (That link should last about a week or so) takes a look at the phenomenon of low-budget, home grown documentaries finding wide audiences in a media landscape dominated for years by escapist fare. Read the whole thing; but here is one spot-on insight:


THE current surge in politically inflected documentaries seems like a mashed-up, digital version of the 1960's, when books like "Silent Spring," "Unsafe at Any Speed" and "The Other America" came out of nowhere to define public debate. Those interested in advancing specific points of view these days are picking up the 800-pound pencil of filmmaking, in part because digital technology has made it easier to deliver complicated political messages in a visual narrative.

But the cluster of serious, point-of-view documentaries may also represent something else, a coup d'etat on the status quo. Just as those big books of the 60's took on the elites of the day (chemical companies, Detroit engineers) these films betray a disaffection with their postindustrial counterparts (Hollywood, the traditional news media) for filling theaters with brain-dead blockbusters and neglecting important stories.

"Documentaries used to explore issues, but there has been an extraordinary explosion of political advocacy," said Sheila Nevins, president of documentary films at HBO. "I don't think the evening news is doing a good job of expressing the confusion about the state of the world, and this is a soapbox that a lot of people are turning to."

Michael Moore, whose "Fahrenheit 911," and "Bowling for Columbine" set the template for the new political documentary, believes there are two reasons we are seeing these films in theaters.

"Mainstream media, especially The New York Times, has failed to cast a skeptical eye on those in power," he said. "The other reason is that Hollywood has not done the job of producing interesting films of substance. If journalism isn't doing the job and fiction isn't doing the job, nonfiction has stepped in with compelling characters, good stories and important films."


I would point out that there is not a coup d'etat going on against the status quo so much as an irresistible breakdown brought on by forces the status quo has no understanding of at all. Our glaciers are not melting because of a coup d'etat by carbon dioxide. That meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs was not a coup d'etat from space.

Later in the piece, Carr stumbles a bit appearing to argue that real seriousness still resides in books - that somehow these new docs lack a certain cultural gravitas. Nor does he mention the life movies now have away from the theaters, in homes, dorm rooms, libraries, and, let's not forget now, iPods. Movies, low cost and personal, are now taking up space - in minds, on shelves and in coat pockets - once reserved exclusively for low cost and personal books.

As some of you know, I normally don't link to outside material, but I do so now mainly because it jibes so nicely with what I wrote yesterday, as does this post which Josh Marshall posted today. Such unlooked-for agreement is catnip to obscurantists like yours truly.

That's Rich

This morning found your humble correspondent in the Borough of Brooklyn, NY with the Sunday New York Times on his unaccustomed lap. After reading a well-wrought recap of yesterday's thrilling soccer match between the United States and Italy (and here I will mention that I am a bit too fond of pointing out to friends that I qualify on paper to play for the Italian side, having three grandparents born in that sad and beautiful land); anyway, after reading the account of that game, I noted the Page One thumbsucker on the number of administration officials who have left government for private enterprise to better fleece the American people, and then turned to this week's column by Mr. Frank Rich.

I am a fan of Frank's and admire how he can lasso a number of sometimes disparate observations into a thematic whole. Perhaps it is a mild case of the summer blahs, but his think piece today struck me as light on thought and heavy on dependable Times Roman attitude. He spent the first third of his meditation taking the administration to task for its patent failures in Iraq while noting that the prevailing attitude in Republican strategic circles will be to hew to that failed policy as the best one they have, spinning dross into electoral gold so to speak.

Rich then takes up the now conventional cudgel against the Democrats, that they have no plan, no standard bearer, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... I stopped reading.

Let me propose the idea that events in Iraq have long ago spun out of the control of anyone, much less the political operatives of the Republican party. After understanding the background is chaos, then, proposing a dominant foreground narrative becomes the main job of anyone looking to maintain control of the levers of power. One could point to three main players in the narrative sweepstakes, that is those looking to advance their own interests by presenting the most compelling story to tell.

The first, of course, is the War Party, and their narrative is getting tired indeed. The second is the entrenched Democratic Party, the main apparatus of which accepts notions of Big Army Business while trying to feed traditional party supporters, which is itself as tired a spectacle as Republican war boosting. The third party involved in the narrative game is the traditional press, which Mr. Rich, as smart and perceptive as he is, represents fully.

However we can also look at these three competitors now as a single side, connected through ties of money, higher education, and the attendant quid pro quos of any professional players looking not only to win any given contest, but also maintain the value of all the franchises as well as the rules of the league. I propose that Mr. Frank Rich is less interested in goading the Democrats into meaningful electoral action, than in advancing his own, and his employer's, credentials as Someone on Whom the Narrative Depends.

As a concrete example of what I am so abstractly driving at, let's look again at that Page One story about the amoral practice of using one's experience in government to enter private enterprise to then job the people's money. We can shake ours heads at the perfidity of such individuals involved in that gravy train merry-go-round, but I would suggest, while we are so engaged, also having a look at all the advertisements in the Sunday New York Times for those special gew-gaws - watches, jewelry, cars, real estate - which might, in fact, induce someone with a less-than-firm grounding in the humanities to double deal in order to grasp. The Times would like to be seen as discouraging a certain behavior, while still offering glimpses of the rewards such behavior can bring. This, my friends, is called The System.

So let me offer a different narrative: The war in Iraq has fucked this country sideways. Americans are sick of it and tired of all the connected crap - high energy prices, enormous deficits and a paralyzed government. Americans, most Democrats and even some Republicans realize a drastic need for change, which is going to come from the hearts of millions of people who might agree with Frank Rich but don't care what the fuck he says on any given Sunday. And furthermore, that this is understood by smart people in the Democratic party who are, in fact, in the driver's seat for the next elections; and who are poised to make the sort of gains that will seem unimaginable until viewed in retrospect.

Nonsense and Insensibility

I never bothered to consider the connection between decency and common sense until very recently, when the death by suicide of three Gitmo prisoners prompted such a reaction from certain spokespersons so indecent as to make me wonder about their capacity to make rational decisions about their own lives.

Within the last day, a U.S. government spokeswoman, speaking to the BBC, dismissed the deaths as good P.R. for the jihadist cause, and some fool in an Army uniform, a general somewhere, characterized the self-murders as acts of war against the United States. Coming so hard upon the latest noise calling 911 victim's wives something like merry widows (from the mouth of one blond in particular who I am expecting to see star in the next stolen home-porn video release any day now), sentiments so heartless so as to appear brainless too.

One can only assume that when the sense of human decency was however abraded from the psyches of these people at an early age, also scoured away was the capacity for evaluating the world with anything other than the dramatic needs of their hypertrophic egos. No one with common sense belittles suicides or criticizes widows in public, or for that matter invades a country expecting to succeed with the meager portions of equipment and planning the War Dogs had on hand. No one with any decency either.

The wheels of government and of much of the opinion press have settled into the hands of those so selfish as to promote their own needs at the expense of rivals. The world was ever thus. However, the concurrent blunting of the nervous system needed to advance the devouring ego in the media jungle now seems to shut down the one thing that allowed wise megalomaniacs in the past to hold on to power, a commonsense understanding of the sensibilities of others.

We have entered a period of stasis in current events, where, since nothing is really new, we are left looking at our public figures less in the bright light of action than a soft one of recollection. As the nation inevitably comes to think about how it got to this point, the workings of decency and common sense become more engaged than they were in the days of mission accomplished. The words of the indecent and nonsensical people who brought us to this point begin to rot in the ears of the Republic.

The Snapper

The great photographer Arnold Newman died last Tuesday. Aside from being one of the last links to the era of weekly photo magazines and epic black-and-white photography, Newman was a champion of the medium as an art form, in which he was a conspicuous early success. He was a skilled, sensitive and resourceful observer, but was an artist first.

Mr. Newman, for I never knew him well enough to call him Arnold, was also exceptionally generous with his time and attention to generations of students and young photographers; as apt to show up to an opening of student work at NYU as at MOMA. The photo of him here, the first I've ever posted at H & J, was taken in his studio by yours truly some 20 years ago when I toiled in the vineyards of photo magazine publishing. I had just interviewed him for a short piece I would do regularly for a magazine sent to college students; a column on photographers and their studios, accompanied by a black-and-white portrait of my own creation.

Newman was my first assignment. The interview went very well. But as I set up the shot to finish, it dawned on me that for my first paying job photographing anybody, I was photographing Arnold Newman. It did not go smoothly. Newman, though, was as affable as one could possibly hope. I tried a couple of different setups before settling, in desperation, on the one you see here. You might note the look of avuncular exasperation on Mr. Newman's face.

At the time I was delighted with the picture. My editor was too. It strikes me now as too mannered, kind of forced. It is a knock-off of a Newman portrait. But I've learned a lot about taking pictures in the last 20 years, and a great deal of that came from studying the work of the man pictured here.

Professor Higgins

The kind attention of friends, old and new, has brough a slight uptick in traffic here. Consequently, where once I could go weeks without a care about posting something, now I feel a little lax going days without saying anything, thinking somehow I'm letting down the team.

This is an interesting bug. One of the problems, as I see it, of the general news media is the barking need to fill up the electric hours with something lest viewers migrate elsewhere. The networks need noise, you know. And so all communications quickly become the same inert things and importance then becomes a matter of repetition. (This is how the medium becomes the message.) If you keep hearing about something over and over again it must be important, right?

We hear a lot about TV shows and they aren't important, same with bestsellers. We hear a lot about the President, and while he is not unimportant, perceptive observers are left thinking that his importance rests largely with an apparatus of interests, part of which is the established commercial electronic media, that itself suffers very little examination.

Your humble author has been fortunate enough in his life to have know several fine teachers. One of them was Jim Higgins in the graduate Journalism program at Boston University. Jim was a former newspaper editor. Before that he had worked in a shipyard and, before that, had been William Carlos Williams' editor at New Directions. He was a jazz writer, a loyal union man and proud Communist, a friend of Castro's, in fact. You can see his FBI file here.

Jim was a slight guy with a calm voice and withering criticism of what has now come to be called the mainstream media. Large news organizations, he said, were only going to report news in ways that benefited ownership. Consequently they were not going to report fairly or completely about labor action, anti-war or anti-poverty demonstrations, the needs of minorities or grassroots community affairs. Ask Danny Schechter and Nat Hentoff, they were old pals of Jim's.

Interestingly, he never appeared angry about the state of things. I think it was his belief that no one could expect large media institutions to behave any other way, and for them to change, people had to change first. This was his Communist ideal showing -- that people can become better. But Jim was wise enough to know that progress takes a very long time and cannot be bought or coerced.

So first have a look at your daily paper. Check out all the ads for automobiles (don't overlook the classifieds) and then decide if the newspaper is the best forum to go over ideas about the need for public transportation. Or check out the real estate and big-box store ads and then think if the editorial board is going to take a strong stand about limiting land use for commercial real estate development.

But papers require readers, and want ads (which is where the real money is) and lately they've been losing both. Craigslist has already done more to change the nature of newspapers than any Pulitzer committee. The old order is crumbling, and though there is no guarantee that the new one will be much better, there is a chance.

Right now the old newspaper order is looking to protect itself by cutting back the one thing it does better than anything else - that is collecting, editing and reporting the news. Instead the news hole is reduced and staffs cut in favor of "Lifestyle" sections. This is folly and many will pay with their financial lives. Newspapers will only survive by delivering better news analysis to a smaller, but far more engaged readership. Any paper expanding its entertainment section is cutting its own throat.

The other dilemma facing the news elite is more endemic to the nature of what they do. Centrist or conservative (I will not insult you by claiming there is a left-leaning major daily newspaper in the United States), they have a lot of prestige tied up in the idea that they are the only institutions capable of explaining the world of events to the rest of us. Lately this assumption has come under increasing examination, derision and scorn, mostly because these aggregates of enfranchised voices are incapable of hearing what the rest of us have to say. Papers will have to become both more polemical and flexible in their outlook, more cranky, personal and lively, if they have any chance of surviving.

I never saw Jim after I left Boston in 1981. He would have been 90 this year. But I think about him a lot, especially in light of what is happening now, and I know he would have found the current and ongoing decay of the old media order to be of absorbing interest and, in light of his beliefs, inevitable.