apocalyptics

The Bush language program of mass distraction

NYT's Frank Rich has another great column. This time he looks at some of the issues surrounding the Plame affair. He concludes that the real scandal is the war:

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

But what most struck me was his pithy summary of Bush's changing language to describe the war and its aftermath:

On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated “Mission Accomplished.” On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that “we found the weapons of mass destruction.” On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to “bring 'em on.” But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. “program.” Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium “should never have been included” in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

Technorati Tags: Plame Affair, Bush's language

24 Season 4

The synergy between news and entertainment was apparent in the Australian premiere of season 4 of 24 tonight.

The first episode begins with a train bombed and derailed by terrorists, then, cross to the first ad break: a news update which leads with the latest on the London subway bombing.

The double episode ended with the usual promo for next week with the announcer urging us to tune in to see “what lengths the terrorists will go to”. After the credits Seven led into an extended news update which included footage of London's mayor Ken Livingston catching a train and a “back-to-work-we-wont-let-them-win” theme.

The dialectic between the visceral build up of tension produced by the “live” structure of 24 and its hero's inevitable triumph is mirrored in the contrasting message of terror and hope embodied in a grim-faced Livingston boarding a train. Although 24 plays the traditional hero myth it also re-wrote the rules of this serial genre by allowing the death of key figures such as Jack's wife in series one. We know that Jack will win but we can no longer be sure at what cost.

Similarly the news is constantly telling us that “we” will win even though we can no longer be sure “what lengths the terrorists will go to”.

Other news included John Howard's denial that Britain was preparing a withdrawal from Iraq which would necessitate Australia sending more troops but a confirmation that Australia would be sending further troops to Afghanistan. This reminder of the nexus between Australian, British and US military operations highlighted the “reality” of the 24 terrorists claim that this was an “us” (muslim) against “you” (western nations) battle.

In this new world the best we can do is get up and get back on the train. Just like Livingston. Just like Jack.

Technorati Tags: 24

Reviews in on Woodward

Editor and Publisher summarises the none to glowing early reviews of Bob Woodward's Deep Throat book, The Secret Man:

One of the leading political writers of today, Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, declares: “If Bob Woodward were in journalism school, his professor might have handed back his new book, 'The Secret Man,' as incomplete.”

And USA Today's chief book critic, Bob Minzesheimer, today writes: “Woodward's book is filled with as many questions as answers. It's more about Woodward than Felt. It's fascinating and frustrating, revealing and disingenuous, self-critical and self-serving.”

Meanwhile, in a Time magazine item, Alicia Shepard (who is writing a biography of Woodward and Bernstein) takes this shot: “Bob Woodward's memoir ... doesn't shed much new light on Watergate. But it does tell us a lot about how Woodward, the journalist who helped bring down a President, cowered around his secret source, W. Mark Felt.”

In his review, Ron Brownstein calls it an “intermittently engaging but ultimately slight memoir” and says Woodward “fails to answer the most important question remaining after Felt unveiled his identity in a Vanity Fair story: Why? Why did a career FBI agent who had ascended to the second-ranking position in the bureau, and who didn't think much of the press, leak such critical information about the scandal to Woodward?

It seems to me that the answer to that question isn't very difficult to answer. It has to do with thwarted ambition. Felt's personal ambition to head the FBI was thwarted by Nixon but also Felt obviously thought that Nixon was thwarting the very agency that Felt had helped Hoover create. This is of course different to the traditional whistle blower's concern for justice because the agency that Felt and Hoover had created had very little to do with justice. Felt himself only avoided jail time via a Reagan pardon over some of his dodgy practices. But for Woodward to admit or speculate about any of this would be to blow the myth of Watergate sky high. Once Felt's ambition was showing then maybe Woodward's own ambition would also be more carefully scrutinised.

Technorati Tags: Deep Throat

Project Deep Impact

The NASA Deep Impact mission which has exploded a probe into an orbiting comet has released a series of impressive images. The mission named after the 1998 film has again blurred the line between popular science and popular culture. Everyone seems excited and impressed but not that clear what its all about. The pop science site Red Nova's report is headlined: “NASA cheers probes direct hit on comet”.

It sounded like science fiction - NASA scientists used a space probe to chase down a speeding comet 83 million miles away and slammed it into the frozen ball of dirty ice and debris in a mission to learn how the solar system was formed.

The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse.

The impact at 10:52 p.m. PDT was cause for celebration not only to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but also for the more than 10,000 people camped out at Hawaii's Waikiki Beach to watch it on a giant movie screen.

“It's almost like one of those science fiction movies,” said Steve Lin, a Honolulu physician.
The cosmic smash-up did not significantly alter the comet's orbit around the sun and NASA said the experiment does not pose any danger to Earth - unlike the scary comet headed for Earth in the 1998 movie, “Deep Impact.”

So much for the spectacle, and the science...

Rough images by the mothership that released the probe on its suicide mission 24 hours earlier showed a bright white flash from the comet upon impact, which hurled a cloud of debris into space. When the dust settles, scientists hope to peek inside the comet's frozen core - a composite of ice and rock left over from the early solar system.

Technorati Tags: Deep Impact

New Keanu Film

I've just been reading about the new Keanu Reeve's film: A Scanner Darkly. It's an adaption of a Philip K Dick novel set in the not too distant future where “we have lost the war on drugs” and Keanu plays an undercover cop/addict in a junkie squat on the track of “Substance D”.

Hopes are high for the film in the sci-fi community. And the Philip K Dick family trust have given it the thumbs up. As one sci-fi site proclaims:

It’s Keanu Reeves in one of author Philip K. Dick’s greatest novels. Whoa!

Even though Philip K. Dick’s work inspired some of the best-known and most beloved sci-fi movies there are (such as Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall) the truth is that the true Dick-ian (don’t snigger you!) movie — reflecting the author’s metaphysical obsession with what reality is and what makes one human — has yet to be made.

The movie version of A Scanner Darkly might just be that movie.

For starters, it is based on one of Dick’s best works, one informed by Dick’s own painful experiences in the drug culture of California in the 1970s. It neatly balances Dick’s own autobiographical experiences, the narrative’s plot requirements and infuses it with Dick’s customary black humour. Yes, despite its bleak subject matter it is also quite funny.

What makes it particularly interesting to me is that it extends Keanu's sci-fi/metaphysical hero journey begun with Johnny Mnemonic and continued into the Matrix and Constantine. But not only that, like the Matrix it also extends the mythology of technology in and of film-making with its innovative techniques.

It has been written and directed by Richard Linklater with his trademark combo of live acting overlaid with animation. Linklater used this technique in his 2001 feature Waking Life which was also a metaphysical tale about dream and reality. The trailer looks startling translating what I take to be the character's hallucinatory engagement with reality into realistic images that have a literal fluidity on the screen. This combination of new high-tech method to translate a vision of the future is an interesting example of what I am calling a “multi-media mythic cluster” where the lineage, the medium(s) and the narrative all combine to proclaim a mythic message.

Here we have an interesting lineage with the ouvres of Dick, Linklater and Reeves all contributing to the underlying discourse about technology, the future and the hallucinatory self. The filmic technique - which of course is always integral to any cinematic narrative - also foregrounds notions of technology and “the new”. The official site describes it like this:

Like a graphic novel come to life, “A Scanner Darkly” will use live action photography overlaid with an advanced animation process (interpolated rotoscoping) to create a haunting, highly stylized vision of the future. The technology, first employed in Richard Linklater’s 2001 film “Waking Life,” has evolved to produce even more emotional impact and detail.

In an interview with the Austin Chronicle one of main animators talks about the task as following the actor's elasticity:

“With A Scanner Darkly, we're trying to be much more cohesive, because we've got A-list actors and those guys need to be recognizable. If you've got somebody like Robert Downey Jr., who is made of elastic – there is nothing on him that is stationary at any time – capturing all of his expressions and doing justice to someone that great an actor is a real challenge. It's interesting to see him in particular, because you never really notice how much goes into acting until you see a guy who is going into the scene that way and you see every little nuance that goes into each little piece of his performance. It's incredibly complex and detailed, and we've really got to capture that in the animation.”

There is clearly a fascinating multilayered construction going on here and from the little that I have seen on the trailer the mirroring that occurs back and forth between texts - script/actor/animator/viewer - is quite powerful.

Technorati Tags: Keanu Reeves, A Scanner Darkly