Did you know that empathy, the ability to understand the hardships of others, is completely incompatible with the American justice system?
Barack Obama obviously didn’t, otherwise he wouldn’t have dropped the E-bomb when he told Planned Parenthood in 2007 that he would nominate a Supreme Court justice with “the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young, teenaged mom; the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.” And the Republicans obviously did, perhaps expressed best by Michael Steele, head of the RNC, when he said, “Crazy nonsense empathetic. I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind! Craziness!”
And clearly no one told Sidney Lumet, director of the 1957 classic 12 Angry Men, a film I recently revisited, that plays out in real time as 12 jurors (all white men) decide the fate of a young thug facing the death penalty for allegedly stabbing his father to death. It had been several years since I’d seen the movie, so I had forgotten that, in many ways, the need for empathy in our justice system is 12 Angry Men’s central theme. And not just empathy in the “I feel your pain” sense. Because it’s empathy, the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, that protects us from the kind of simplistic, closed-minded caricaturing that leads to racism, classism and sexism. RIGHT ON YOUR BEHIND!
Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street is still considered one of the best movies ever made about the moral and economic corruption of Wall Street and the financial industry. But instead of acting as a cautionary tale about the dangers of materialism and corporate greed, Michael Douglass magnetic turn as Gordon Gekko, a cold-blooded corporate raider and the films villain, actually inspired generations of wannabes to become investment bankers so they could follow in Gekko’s slimy footsteps. An industry that sees a lying, greedy, double-crossing corporate criminal like Gekko as a role model. And we wonder how we got in this mess.
While Gus Van Sant’s flim Milk is getting a lot of much-deserved kudos, a better film about Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, has already won an Oscar. That film is The Times of Harvey Milk, which one the Oscar for best documentary in 1984 and is, in my opinion, the better of two very good movies.
Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning documentary, THE FOG OF WAR, is about Robert McNamara — a statistician so smart that he was asked by two presidents to use his smarts at the very highest levels in matters of life and death. Another way of looking at it is that McNamara, who was the secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, is the Donald Rumsfeld of his time, widely considered to be the architect of the Vietnam war. Using over 20 hours of interviews, Morris uses McNamara to give an insider’s view of recent history, as well as a portrait of a man grappling with his responsibility for the millions of deaths that occurred as a result of his counsel.
Based on the best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild tells the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man from an upper middle class family who embarked on a personal quest after graduating from college in 1991. But instead of using his trust fund to go backpacking in Europe or do mushrooms for a year, McCandless abandoned his car, cut up his credit cards and ID, donated or burned all his money, and set out on a philosophical, and ultimately fatal journey across the American west and into the Alaskan wilderness.
Into the Wild is a personal story about one mans journey, but it also speaks to something many in modern society feel — a desire to opt out.
Guess who’s coming to dinner, America? A BLACK PRESIDENT! Well, half-black, anyway.
With Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, a half-black man will, in many ways, be joining the families of millions of not-black Americans in a way that our nation has never experienced before. So that seemed like the perfect time for me to see, for the very first time, Stanley Kramer’s groundbreaking, Oscar-winning 1967 classic, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s a film about what happens when a white couple gets the surprising news that Dr. John Wade Prentice, an esteemed black doctor with the World Health Organization (played by Sidney Poitier), will literally be joining their family when he marries their young daughter, whom he has only known for ten days.
Can we please dispense with the idea that Bush kept America safe when his decision to invade Iraq has caused more US deaths than 9/11? From the AP:
As of Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009, at least 4,229 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The figure includes eight military civilians killed in action. At least 3,404 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.
The AP count is the same as the Defense Department's tally, last updated Wednesday at 10 a.m. EST.
In retaliation for the 9/11 Bush let happen in the US, Bush created a 9/11-and-a-half in Iraq. Bush cheerleaders should ask those dead soldiers and the tens of thousands of soldiers wounded how glad they are that Bush kept them safe.
Thanks to our great friends and allies at Get Afghanistan Right, it seems like a real discussion about the wisdom of military escalation in Afghanistan is finally underway. And this discussion isn’t just on progressive blogs and the anti-war left — it’s in the halls of power, where the final decisions will be made. During Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state (transcript here), John Kerry voiced his concerns:
KERRY: Let me begin with Afghanistan, if I may. I am deeply concerned that, at least thus far, our policy in Afghanistan has kind of been on automatic. And I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I would not see all of our conflicts, ground operations in the context of Vietnam. I really try hard. I have an automatic check that says, you know, not everything is that.
But I have to tell you, in the several visits I have now made, escape it as I might, the parallels just really keep leaping out in so many different ways. –snip-
Our original goal was to go in there and take on Al Qaeda. It was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. It was not to adopt the 51st state of the United States. It was not to try to impose a form of government, no matter how much we believe in it and support it, but that is — that is the mission, at least, as it is being defined today.
It’s the one where the US invades a country with the very best intentions. Where we are ignorant to or ignore the culture we are invading and assume that everyone will magically get along and want to be just like us when we stop bombing them. Where we think we’ll be seen as liberators and friendly helpers, not occupiers.
It’s the one where we assume that citizens of a country would be better off fighting each other than fighting an occupying foreign army (us). Where we figure our new subjects will easily forgive the fact that we occasionally kill scores of innocent civilians and never quite say we’re sorry. Where we think everyone will love the puppet government we install for them. It’s the one where we attempt to win hearts and minds with soldiers, bullets, and bombs, and when that doesn’t work, we try sending more soldiers, more bullets, and more bombs. Where we fail to improve the lives of those we claim to liberate, causing them to yearn for the relative stability of the oppressive past we claim to have rescued them from. Where we don’t realize that the people fighting us are not the fringe, but a popular movement committed to repulsing a foreign army that kills civilians.
We saw this movie when it was called Vietnam, and again in the sequel called Iraq, which repeated the mistakes of the original — no plot, a muddled message, poor direction, over budget, and no ending. Yet now we find ourselves in pre-production on another sequel that follows the same losing formula and is sure to be an awful, lethal, costly flop. It’s called Afghanistan II — and we need to pull the plug on it before it literally bombs, taking untold numbers of Americans, Afghans, and our economy with it.
The world has seen the infamous pictures from Abu Ghraib, and we've heard George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and military brass blame it all on a small handful of "bad apples" going rogue on the night shift. But in all that whitewash, the voices of the soldiers in those photos, the people who really know what happened at Abu Ghraib and served time for it, were lost, drowned out, or silenced. And those are the voices you finally get to hear in Errol Morris' impressive 2008 documentary, Standard Operating Procedure.
To learn more about Standard Operating Procedure, go here. And for more Brave New Reviews, go here.
