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Today's
Stories
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
December 13 / 14, 2003
Searching for the
Barbarians
Denys
Arcands "The Barbarian Invasions"
By NORMAN MADARASZ
Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions
is a satirical drama, told in the comic style most familiar to
Woody Allen's greatest works. Its time is our time: troubled
waters. It's also a rare phenomenon, an international success
produced in a minuscule market: Quebec. The film has charmed
international audiences with its blistering self-criticism and
emotional character development. As comedy often does, it delivers
some deft demystification on Canada and North America.
Nothing befits a paradise in the current
Age of Lying more than some solid self-criticism. The Barbarian
Invasions offers a vast array of that for thirsting film
viewers. First world hospital hallways filled to claustrophobic
horror; under-the-table corruption in a nation culturally distinct,
one would imagine, from "third world countries"; stupendous
free use of drugs; and all this mixed in with Canada's delightful
autumn feast of colors in the most sardonic put downs a North
American people can still dream of saying about themselves within
the confines of a National Security State.
These are only some of the film's items
that have been drawing in the international crowds, no small
feat for a Canadian production. The film, for instance, is a
current run away hit in Rio de Janeiro. What's not all that clear
is how much the Cariocas, like other 'allophones' are drawing
from the film's double narrative and dubious title. Recall that
in Rio most intellectual discussions have to end with a laugh.
Then again, when checking Quebec's off-again on-again wish to
be considered a 'Latin American' nation, chuckling under the
direst of circumstances tends to back up its claim.
In fact, there might be no literary trope
more Latin than irony. By settling on the title of The Barbarian
Invasions Denys Arcand chose to play that card in his strongest
hand. Few directors can do so with as much intelligence. Yet
as a sequel to his international hit, The Decline of the American
Empire, irony risks being resolved into communal sentimentality.
From 1986, the Decline had leaned
heavily on the same trope. The film seemed to conquer in its
gambit of depicting the cynicism tucked behind the mores and
moods of a thriving North American middle class university culture.
This was no longer Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia
Wolf, a tale in which oedipal conflict backfires into marital
breakdown through professional resentment, rivalry and jealousy.
Decline portrayed a world of guiltless, unabashed affirmation.
Ideological 'isms' ended up falling by the wayside into meaningless
trends. Intellectual and professional pursuits, the task of creating
an egalitarian, just society, or the nostalgic lament of a failed
and bygone civilization, grew increasingly disparate as the mixture
of humors parted into circulatory paths.
On all levels, Decline had sex
spelling redemption. Blood stayed in the veins, or left the body
only in transfigured heat. This redemption revealed the inner
secret that pleasure has no limit to its intensity, leaving many
of us ill-prepared to deal with our very finite lifetime. In
a key scene, sexual pressure is relieved within a minute's massage.
Intellectual triumph looks as wasted as the semen staining a
towel. Irony carried the truth of Arcand's message. It steered
the view toward truth's capsizing against a common ode to variations
on post-coital resignation.
THE NEXT STROKE IN
ROMAN HISTORY
In Arcand's latest film, the title leads
the viewer on toward the next step in Roman history. How appreciate
a step it is. As with the television pundit whose words are seemingly
broadcast only to a dumbstruck hospital attendant's ears, for
many fans of Roman civilization, the September 11th attacks immediately
took on the allure of the great historical periods when empires
go down shaking. The barbarians had struck! Or as the pundit
puts it: "September 11th will be remembered for marking
the beginning of the great barbarian invasions"-but not,
mind you, for the fall of the empire itself. As with Rome, the
pundit sees the American Empire continuing into centuries of
eventual insignificance and a despotism foretold by the founding
fathers.
The two-step historical reference in
the films' respective titles may follow the story line told by
Edward Gibbon in the 19th century The Rise and Fall of the
Roman Empire. But there is a fair bit of Gore Vidal hovering
about. The specifics about when the declining period of
Rome began gathers little consensus among scholars. If decline
refers to the changing seat of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople
after the shift from Paganism to Christianity, then it actually
refers to rising power. Even so, with Rome in the projector,
decline inevitably mixes meanings with decadence. This is something
one finds well before Caligula in the third century, in fact
as early as Nero who was close enough to Christ's Era to have
allegedly sent the apostle Peter to his crucifixion. If instead
decline points to the loss of administrative control over the
borders, then it means nothing less than the "barbarian
invasions" evoked by the film's sequel.
The work of irony is best loved for being
inherently critical. It rarely misses a moment to estrange or
distance. Irony strives to break truth's false pretenses in order
to realign it with respect to what's real. This is not exactly
what Arcand has done. In his film, he releases the bonds of social
indifference in contemporary Quebec, which are already loose
enough. Then he lets them edge toward discriminating against
those excluded, for various reasons, from the community. The
film's perceived barbarian invasions only end up tightening society
around family and communal poles so as to protect what we have
in the way we are. Panic triggered by this perception goes on
to provide the smooth continuity by which increased security
and surveillance may be implemented on the political scale.
In film form, Arcand has found no better
way to illustrate this tightening up around security concerns
than by bringing the original cast of the Decline back
together again under some rather unfortunate circumstances. Fifteen
years later, the characters are older, naturally. Their children
are now working adults--or at least some of are in some fashion.
The terminal fate of a protagonist, Remy, the university professor
of history and general bon vivant, has literally provoked an
invasion of the circle's lives. For Remy is dying quickly from
a brain tumor.
Death, in Arcand's view, is rarely individual
and always literal. Remy has to struggle with a reality succinctly,
if gauchely, put by his best friend's bimbo opportunist of a
wife as: "all sickness begins in the head and ends in the
head". As his old-time friends and family gather, the tumorless
heads take the law into their own hands, slowly substituting
heroin as Remy's pain killer to finally wheel in a final fix
by film's end. Remy understands his organic state is elapsing
when the pleasure of a dégustation of wine and
truffles vanishes in an anticipatory paean to insignificance.
That's when euthanasia becomes the sole substitute for a life
devoid of pleasure.
As part of Quebec's post-1968 generation,
Remy was and is a committed social-democrat. In the course of
the 1980s his idealism never flew as high as when it was expressed
over a fine glass of Bourgogne and foie gras. At the peak
of culinary ecstasy, he might have even called himself a Communist.
Now ill, his first ideological test, like Anthony hallucinating
on Mount Colzim, is Quebec's hospitals. Faced with soaring medical
industry costs, Canada's universal health care system faces a
crisis in many provinces. Impassible, Remy declaims how he still
stands firm in his vote for "nationalizing the hospital
system" in Quebec. He has no choice but to intone. In these
times declaring oneself in favor of social reform is quite akin
to acting on it.
The fact remains that egalitarian values
in times of provincial and federal government belt-tightening
has ended up filling hospital emergency wards in Canada as far
as into the hallways. In a long forward pan, the sick and ailing
unfold as if in parting sheets. The unaffordable cost of high-tech
laboratory analysis equipment forces those who can afford it
to head south of the border into Vermont's private clinics. That's
where Remy's social-democratic body is whisked off to get a PET
scan, thanks to his son's abundant funds. In the meantime, the
middle class proles back home have to put their tumors
on ice as they bide time on waiting lists.
Remy's son, Sebastien, is a golden boy.
He's a venture capitalist specializing in risk and employed by
the Lloyds of London. Despite deeply harbored resentment in an
inversion of the sixties generation gap, that is, a socialist
father disowning his capitalist son, Sebastien returns to Montreal
from his home in London to help his father in the latter's twilight.
Their relationship fares far better than others. His wife, for
instance, hysterically seeks emotional support from Remy's mistresses.
As for his daughter, she remains an oceanographer at sea. Unable
or unwilling to return for the fatal occasion, she does insist
on relaying bits and bites of computer video messages to her
ailing Dad.
With his good capitalist credentials,
Sebastien performs a paradigm shift: his father now lies in a
comfortably renovated, formerly abandoned private hospital room.
Then, he manages to find access to a supply of heroin so as to
bypass inept institutional painkillers, a.k.a. watered-down morphine.
With the self-assurance wealth can bring, Sebastien initially
tries accessing junk through the narcs themselves. When morality
bends in submission to money, all values stand equal. Never one
to over-extend a proposal, Sebastien smells the narcs' suspicion
and decides to swerve his BMW into the streets to find his treasure
trove by other means. Even with the narcs on his tail, a shared
university education and designer suits will have them enlist
as Sebastien's team of guardian angels.
Canadian society is tolerant and wealthy.
It has allowed some wealth redistribution to actually take place.
But it's been an upper middle class affair all along. We can
find a world in which a drug needs no pseudonym provided that
like minds only think alike.
The Barbarian Invasions ends with Remy-the-father's beautiful death
at his friend's luxury cottage on the shores of Lake Memphramagog,
in Quebec's Estrie region. In the fall season, the leaves of
Quebec's trees turn into a vivid celebration of color as Remy
symphonically fests a dual narrative on the evolution of world
events and personal relationships. These lines begin in parallel,
but disturbance twists them into intertwining complexity. The
moment finally arrives for those who once proclaimed the US to
be Rome's reincarnation. They can now find themselves bemused
with history's repetition in the film' title. After all, how
many of our educated class dubbed the 9/11 attacks in similar
terms? By the film's climax, though, irony will have ceased deflecting
any denial that the title is little else than a literal statement
on our times.
Suddenly at the crescendo of the world's
evolution, as spicily recounted by Remy et al. in typically
Quebecois sallies of wit, from center stage left enters the barbarian
himself. Neither the leader of the Ashishin nor of some terror
group, he emerges merely as an individual capitalist, almost
innocent, veiled only beneath the son's silhouette. "The
Prince of the Barbarians", his father proclaims.
SEARCHING FOR THE
BARBARIANS
If Arcand's death semantics are indeed
rarely individual in extension, and always literal, it is fair
to ask whether the title really and only refers to the cynical
capitalist. Would the 'barbarian' reference be aiming at the
son who proved his father's values to be groundless and illusory
in their failure to get their share of the monetary equivalent?
Or does the title point to a revelation? Does it aim at describing
anything foreign as barbarian, while acts committed in our name
which provoke death and destruction are matters for sentimental
sorrow?
One path by which to answer these doubts
is by checking up how the film portrays what's foreign. Upon
being interned, Remy has to share a room with other patients,
most notably an Indo-Pakistani Muslim man. In close communion
the Muslim patient's family is silently omnipresent at his bedside.
In daily Canadian reality Muslims share public space with Jews
and Christians with hopefully a lower degree of fear of being
pariahs. They are apparently subject to less police harassment,
controls and deportation than is common practice nowadays in
Patriot Act USA.
Quebec society has proved to be a particularly
tolerant one regarding immigrants-provided they speak French.
The film emits fuzzy signals, though. The Islamic family lingers
in the background indistinct, even indifferent in its foreign
tongue, welcomed as it may be. Yet their members fall short of
being portrayed as fully partaking in a communicational and social
partnership. Neither Remy nor the Pakistani patient reaches out
to discuss the world events referred to in the title. Nor do
they have anything else to say to each other. Both may be dying.
What's more evident is that the film's title ends up contextualized
by the North American Muslim citizen's silent presence.
Later in the countryside, the community
of Remy's friends discusses what makes up intelligence on the
world historical scale. A metadiscourse on world political history
is something Arcand at times feverishly strives to turn inside
out, as if in a palimpsest. The professors willing admit that
intelligence does not always exist, or rather seldom does. It
is certainly nothing specific to our culture, if our culture
can at all be said to exhibit intelligence in these terms. These
intellectuals recall how during the European Middle Ages, i.e.
the so-called Western Christian Dark Ages, intelligence had shifted
its abode to the Arab civilization. But the space they open to
offset the barbarian taint with which many media pundits try
to paint modern day Arabs and Muslims is just as soon shut.
When dealing with the Greeks, we hear
of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, to say nothing of the
philosophers. Rome spawns some philosophers, too, but especially
statesmen, political commentators and poets. Yet with the unusual
self-certainty of trained skeptics, the professors provide no
characters of the great past Arab mind, no Ibn-Rushd, no al-Kindi,
no Akbar the Great. In the reference's silent wake, they provide
little assurance as to whether their analysis of intelligence
is itself salient. When facts are borne to disprove misconceptions,
it isn't only sloppy debate to not refer to them. It simply changes
nothing in the clichés that dominate much of our talk
in the first place.
With the Muslim family held to silence
in the film, one could hardly take Arcand's irony at its suggestive
value. Consequently, he glides dangerously close to what many
Rome lovers have held on their lips ever since 9/11. These history
buffs are convinced the barbarians have started attacking the
new Empire's seat. Yet with Arab civilization and history held
to muted ignorance, Arcand's irony crumbles into communitarian
self-certainty. In the end, irony does little service to the
director in his sequel to the Decline. Despite the cultural
difference Remy declaims as making him a non-American, it is
still American values and its economic system that, though it
fails to save his life, at least redeems the beauty of his death.
Both the meta-text and personal relations
portrayed in the film fall short of irony's power to deliver
on truth. If it's truth that the film is aiming for, then there's
no need for "barbarians" to come aground to spur on
the decline. That's because in historical terms, any analogy
between Rome and the US is simplistic at best. Even Middle East
scholar, Bernard Lewis, not one to belittle America's grandeur,
emphasizes how the US has never single-handedly colonized an
entire geopolitical space like Rome, let alone Great Britain,
had-and nor will it under the present circumstances.
The term 'barbarian' was coined by the
Greeks to refer to all non-Greeks. The Greeks may have thought
of the latter as 'uncivilized', though only in their wildest
hubris. For the Persians and Egyptians were anything but that.
Later, just as Rome happened to be invaded by 'barbarians', so
also did Baghdad at the height of Arab civilization. By 1258,
the city that had been the greatest center of culture, science
and administrative control for 300 years was overrun by Hulagu,
Genghis Khan's grandson. This fact was not missed by several
American scholars prior to the Iraq invasion. Nor for that matter
was the fact that the infamous "Assassins" were Arabs
apparently resisting the Mongol and Turkic invasions: so many
other barbarians.
It almost seems as though ever since
the growing American debacle in Iraq, pundits have grown silent
about history and barbarians. The way American forces overran
the city may have occurred at a time when Baghdad was no longer
the world's capital. Their attack and subsequent failure to protect
the city's cultural heritage still wrought more destruction than
even the Mongol warriors had when killing the last Abbasid caliph.
As for the invasions suffered by the British Empire, the attacks
at home during the blitz were wielded by the hands of an altogether
different kind of 'barbarian', namely the most advanced national
civilization of the time: Germany.
From the Brazilian and Latin American
perspective, the term lost its innocence long ago when Las Casas
accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores on their civilizing missions
in the 16th century. His report to the Spanish crown is literature
steeped in blood. It provides descriptions of massacres he personally
witnessed. Indian nation after Indian nation fell before the
Conquistadores' brutality as Indians were either forced into
slavery or massacred when resisting. Prior to the Africans, the
slave economy involved Indians. It was one of the European's
initial plans for the land, a gift from the civilized. When Indian
peoples survived, their populations were soon decimated by disease.
Las Casas convincingly argued that faced with such brutality,
the Indians were anything but barbarians, while the Spanish were
nothing but their own projection.
A DEEP DESIRE TO ACCUSE
Las Casas drew his conclusions by self-critically
accusing his own society-something that neither Invasions
nor much of North American art has done persuasively of late.
The bottom line is not so much to press the point that attacks
and invasions may be committed by those who are not 'barbarians'.
Nor is it to claim that the decline and fall of civilizations
do not necessarily occur through the means suggested by the film's
title. Nor even is it really to question the nature of the 9/11
attacks-with the US administration withholding information regarding
the suspected role of some sectors of its Saudi Arabian allies,
how can political media analysts expect to get their hands on
objective data?
The point is only to draw the following
minor literary observation. When irony collapses a community
sentimentally begins folding inward. Comfort may have made our
populations intellectual cowards-but the true test is yet to
come. In the film, the capitalist son makes up with the socialist
father, even when the latter proclaims the former the real prince
of the barbarian order. In fact, never have they been closer.
Death may be the great unifier of divergent
ideologies. But Arcand's film only settles on the most sentimental
of personal struggles through which to point to difficult times
in the Empire.
If on Quebecois soil, one can share their
hospital space with a Muslim family without considering them
as different to any other immigrant minority, the 'indifference'
remains mute to any communication and conversation. Remy, the
historian, has nothing to say to his neighbors. He has nothing
to ask or inquire about despite the obvious and ponderous post
9/11 tone-solemnly carried through the film by Arvo Part's sonic
sibylline wafts. In light of this portrayal it's still wise to
consider Aristotle's critical observation on how those who are
without speech in a community are no better than vegetables.
So Barbarian Invasions is a film
about North American society as obsessively seeking communal
reinforcement. The slight difference and 'cultural distinction'
that may be voiced by the Quebec minority is simply irrelevant
in the end when patterns do nothing but overlap.
Since at least the sixties, the pop cultural
world has assumed an overwhelmingly critical role in social culture,
and in ripe times, politics. Ours, among the most troubling of
times by both the manifest and latent decisions we are making
as a culture, seem to fall out from the earshot of our musicians
and, especially, our filmmakers. Writing, namely prose and poetry
alike, is the art now taking back a critical edge from what the
mass information/visual media had euphorically wrenched from
its grasp for two decades. As Amiri Baraka wrote in Somebody
Blew up America: "Who/Who/Who"?
Political statements like the ambivalent
pathos of Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, or Springsteen's
reaching out or Madonna's twist and shout are little else than
marketing deferrals. Neil Young lost ground to Dylan in his recent
'political commentary', which simply proved he just didn't read
enough to oppose the aerial attack on Afghanistan. Those who
have yet to record their protest, just like the internet scribes,
are meeting deception in an information society reluctant to
let their words enter the public domain. Only the collective
film, September 11, had its moments-especially when bred
by the grace of Samira Makhmalbaf, who far too may North Americans
take as belonging to the 'other side'.
Denys Arcand's film is nowhere near as
ambitious as a political comedy can be. At times the film may
even seek to take on too much, too fast-such as the religious
history of Quebec, or even the young junky's unlikely mood and
energy swings while on a fix. But Arcand's fullest statement
occurs when casting himself as the bought trade unionist who
returns Sebastien's mysteriously lost laptop to the tune of:
"What? It just turned up? Yeah, that's what happened.
Someone found it. That's what happened." By doing so, Arcand
merely shows us the hitches and glitches of a society in which
money can buy everything. But when it comes to taking apart society's
structures, he confirms how the cinematic art has also been bought-unwilling,
or even unable, to instruct, inform and guide viewers regarding
the perennial question: What now? What next?
Beneath the false pretence of the inefficiencies
of socialist or social-democratic planning, explicitly set to
neoliberal fiscal constraints, citizens as rightful political
plaintiffs are vanishing in a roll of bills. Is that it? Yes,
that's how it happened. Not everyone is softly corrupt, but you'd
have to be a thickskulled bureaucrat, like the hospital president,
to resist. For the other 'normal' folk, like the trade unionist
himself, money doesn't corrupt-it just gets you things, necessary
things.
So it seems that just as it was worth
it for some Christian atheists to remain Catholic in order to
guarantee burial and a smooth glide to heaven, so also is it
worth bidding on the capitalist game to make your dying days
at least feel more human-or godly.
If Arcand had really meant to designate
Sebastien as a Western Osama, a.k.a. the "prince of the
barbarians", very little in his film and especially its
beautiful death resolution would suggest so. For the reconciliation
between the "leftist" history professor and the "neoliberal"
golden boy is done not so much at the system's expense than at
ordinary people's. In this category, no one should hesitate to
include the elements of Barbarian Invasions that lead
some viewers to associate the film's title negatively with things
Muslim.
As for Brazilians, they have had to swallow
representations of themselves as "anti-American" due
to their president's adamant refusal to support the American
invasion of Iraq. From Syria President Lula even upped the ante
last week when calling for the immediate withdrawal of American
troops from the occupied country. By making a hit of Arcand's
film, though, Brazilians may be oblivious to the fact that their
minds are being made up by others. Drawn unaware by its title,
the Cariocas, like other international viewers, are connecting
with a story that Arcand, after having lost control over irony,
should have told otherwise. In the way he has, the communal sentimentalism
filling the film from start to finish is merely a cover-up for
faith in a free market ideology that only last year ending up
proving its meddle in a corrupt corporate undertow fed on by
a savage and self-righteous yearning for class privilege.
Freed from any barbarian subtext, Quebec
would have remained a truly different place, then. In the flesh
it would have proved its difference from shareholder capitalist
economies. It would have shown how justified the struggle indeed
is to resist against having medicare, among other elements of
its social capital, be evaluated only according to the small
print of profit and the crooked balance sheet lines that split
assets from liabilities. If streamlined privatization is our
collective paradigm to be, then a system that was once available
to all-even to our recently arrived Muslim and Brazilian immigrants-will
finally be lost.
Canadian philosopher, Norman Madarasz,
teaches and writes on philosophy and international relations
in Rio de Janeiro. He welcomes comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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