The Wound of Mourning

The Wound of Mourning. That's the title that the editors of their collection of Derrida's obits and eulogies, not The Work Mourning. Perhaps The W(h)ine of mourning would work too. Or the (K)Not Working of Mourning. Anything but "work." So Protestant.

The F#@K It List

The F#@K It List. That's the title of my new trade self-help book. The Pitch: instead of making a list of the things you want to do before you kick the bucket (as in the movie The Bucket List), you're better making a "F@#K It list of the things you have been doing but didn't want to do and have managed to stop doing.Like the Book of Proverbs, my book will dispense (with) "wizdumb" in the form of totally contradictory advice. Like "hurry up and die" and "But wait! There's more. . ." By stopping yourself, you manage to grow emotionally and eventually have a better death. Chapters include "Hello, Death, Goodbye Life," "It's YOUR Funeral," "Die Right,""He Did It His Way," Wait for it . . . . ," "Downhill Racer," "Give It a Rest," and "Have a Great Death." Target Demographic: Readers 55 and older.

Quentin Tarentino's Exceptional States of Exception

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a surprisingly thoughtful as well as clever film. Tarantino establishes new kinds of multiple plotting within a five act structure (the film calls them chapters). Reviews thus far have focused either on the self-conscious references to other films, regarding Basterds as more or less typical Tarantino, or its alleged anti-Semitism. In my view, the film is not anti-Semitic. It allegorizes the politics of film violence in ways that puts intense pressure on an apparent distinction between the diegetic Nazi audience viewing the war film within the film (Hitler loves it) and the audience watching the Tarantino film (us). More interestingly, Tarentino indulges and interrogates a fantasy about ending WWII by killing Hitler et al and Nazism in toto through two scenes involving what Carl Schmitt (Nazi and Catholic political theorist) called the "state of exception." During a "state of emergency," Schmitt argues in The Concept of the Political, the state could suspends the laws and treat a certain class of people as exceptions to the rule (trials and appeals were done away with people the Nazis viewed as enemies of the state--non-persons, actually). The first state of exception scene involves calculating the odds.:"999.999" probability versus "fate" offering "a hand from the pages of history." A story that seems too good to be true actually is true. The second scene closes the film. The war is now over, yet Brad Pitt leaves his trademark on the Nazi collaborator /traitor who allows Hitler et al to be killed; Pitt carves very deeply a swastika into the SS villain's forehead and saying to the one surviving American soldier, "I think this is my masterpiece." In this closing scene, the exceptional part Apache practice--continues in peace time as a masterpiece--(Pitt is part Apache and is linked early on to John Wayne through a door frame shot straight out of John Ford's Searchers --that film's plot begins soon after the Civil War has ended; Tarantino's opening scene is reminiscent of the Indian attack near the beginning of The Searchers, minus the implied rapes). The war is over, but art allows for more violence in a single case. This kind of artistic ends the film but calls the status of ending through "good" violence versus "bad" violence into question. In the scene in the movie theater when the French Jewish heroine Shoshanah comes on screen and her boyfriend ignites the silver nitrate film behind the screen, the screen image goes up in flames. The diegetic cinema screen and her image seems to go up into flames as well, even as the heroine's laughter starts to seem banshee like (her laughter makes her sound like a witch--as if the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz hadn't melted.)The sequence recalls the "bad" Maria robot of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, on the one hand, and her destruction but also calls up the retaliatory fire bombing of German civilians (planned by the British since 1940) by the British and American in Dresden and other German cities. The tone of Inglourious Basterds is extremely well-callibrated--the violence is surprisingly toned down in almost even case and is done very quickly; suspense is created like in the usual (even good) war action films, and Tarantino's humor comes through in the monologues he gives some characters (the actors perform them wonderfully). But the humor is never so great that you can do more than smile. There is really no release in the film. The first violent film I found to be shockingly subdued. Tarantino has a character invoke Hamlet at one point, and QT's film indeed seems like a revenge tragedy (most of the "good" characters who die do so very abruptly). Justice and peace are seemingly impossible to combine, as we cycle past violence into the violence of the present, Nazi Germany having become much more than a specter that more than haunts the United States.

A lot of the criticism on rounds its alleged anti-semitism (american Jewish GIs act like Nazis) is based an failure to read the film's plot as well as it lessons in film history (the sequence on silver nitrate footage as explosive) and their integration. In terms of the plot, there are two conspiracies to kill Hitler and the audience. Both succeed. One includes the Jewish survivor of hte SS murder at the start of the film, who shoots the film's star (the German version of Sargeant York, according to the German solider turned star of the Nazi opposite film number, Pride of the Nation (a fictional film based Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) based on the true story of the Texas Tower sniper and that ends in a drive in screening of a film starring Boris Karloff, who also stars in Targets) and then in turn is shot and killed by him though can't possibly have survived the three shots she gave him in the back, a sort of repetition of the brutal and surprisingly long scene in which the German film star (Diane Kruger) is strangled by Hans Landa, the SS villain. There's an overhead shot from the end of the climatic fight sequence from Taxi Driver here as well. As you can see, a lot of the film runs through late 60s into early 70s cinema--hence the spaghetti Western sound track themes). Nevertheless, the heroine's black lover gets her signal because it comes through her addition to the film. So her plot succeeds through film, through her film of the conspiracy, not by simple "action," and that action, of course, means using film footage as a bomb. And Hans Landa has left a bomb under Goebbels' seat which explodes before the bombs on the legs of the two GIs do. Moreover, it is Landa who lets the plot succeed. So there is a German-Jewish tension at the heart of the film's multiple plotting that cannot be resolved by equating of totally separating Nazis and Jewish civilian resistance fighters and Jewish GIs with Nazis. Moreover, the film again and again points to the centrality of film for the Nazis, much as it was central to the war effort in the U.S. Tarantino just literalizes the film as weapon metaphor, turning film itself into the explosive. Here Tarantino borrows a scene from Hitchcock's Sabotage--a film canister carried by Stevie explodes while he is on a London bus; the beginning of htis sequence appears in Tarentino's film). Just as Roosevelt had screenings of films like Olivier's Henry V and supporting Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, so Hitler viewed various films, including, according to the film the Lives of he Bengal Lancers (in which Gary Cooper also stars, as he does in Sargeant York, as a kind of take action, engage the enemy NOW officer). The film's references to UFA, Leni Riefensthal,ad son all work to make the point that violence in film is not separate from violence outside film either for liberal democracies or fascist states; moreover, propaganda films made by the U.S. and by Germany aren't that different. Tarantino keeps drawing parallels and doubles, but mixing things up as well. The people in the two conspiracies don't know about each other and act independently, and Hans Landa only knows about one of them. The logic of action movies like the Eagle Has Landed or melodramas like Casablanca is entirely subverted by vertiginous references to historical events that were filmed and to films about history that refer to other films. So when Tarantino says that the civilian french couple who run the French cinema are like suicide bombers, it is naive to think he is drawing a simple comparison between real suicide bombers and cinematic ones. We already know, don't we, that television, the internet, and film are all central to Al-Queda? That they post videos of violence--that the Americans engage in their own psy-ops and always have? That the distinction between terrorist violence either by Israel (settlements, bulldozing, bomb dropping, gun fire) or by occupied Palestinians is not to be reduced to the same or the totally opposite? IG doesn't deny a difference between "real" history and film history but prevents any kind of interpretation in which one kind of history is read as the master of the other: the specters of victims haunting the present produced by traumas of the past can ever be exorcised or "re-membered" because the trauma itself already included always already spectral media (film, photography) which always route evidence through fantasy.

The mark of the Swastika at the end of IG is a remarking, a repetition of an earlier scene. In the first scene, we see a the end that the soldier has a swastika carved in his forehead. So we know the "masterpiece" at the end can be hidden as well. What marks Naziism is not is not an open wound or scar, but a hidden wound. Nazism did not know itself for what it is. Neither do Americans know their liberal democracy for what it is, Tarantino implies, as we are mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know but don't want to know about the extralegal violence the government (even under Obama) commits in the name of "state security."

Daniel Mendelsohn's reading of the film as anti-semitic: http://www.newsweek.com/id/212016/page/1 (My thanks to Jimmy Newlin for this link).

WHen Did our Government Become a COVER-nment

Thinking back to the the exposure of the White House coverup of the Watergate break in that led Nixon to resign or face impeachment, I'm forced to wonder now if it is possible to prosecute government officials like Bush, Cheney, Rumsefeld, and so on, who were not forced out of office or appointment (maybe Rumsfeld was at the lsat minute). Nixon went back to California and became a recluse. But Cheney is out there all over the place, with one of his daughters too,defending what he did and denying that it was illegal and calling for the release of CIA documents even though his was the most secretive administration ever. And now we have Senators Lieberman and Graham saying that their law making it illegal to release the still unreleased photos and video of crimes committed at Abu Gharib MUST BE PASSED or they will block ALL legislation even though they have acknowledged that the unreleased materials show even more serious acts of violence and torture than those we have seen and even though Obama has already said, wrongly, that he will not release them. Is this not an open cover up? Isn't it tantamount to legalizing obstruction of justice since Lierman and Graham acknowledge that the evidence shows that (war) crimes were committed?

“A Troubling Allegory: 1945”

Good evening, ladies and Gentlemen. Imagine, if you will, that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg succeeded in assassinating Hitler in 1944 and immediately negotiated Germany’s conditional surrender to the Allied Forces. It’s now 1945. Wounded war hero von Stauffenberg has just been elected Chancellor of Germany. The first one-eyed and one-armed man ever to be elected to office in Germany, Chancellor von Stauffenberg leads a liberal Democratic parliamentary majority coalition and promises an investigation into Nazi war crimes and the restoration of the rule of law. Nevertheless, some Nazis are elected and form a minority party. But the promised investigation of Germany’s recent past has been put on hold: no Nuremberg trials, “no criminalization of politics,” no punishment for mere policy differences the Nazis and with present liberal government, no banning of the Nazi party or destruction of Nazi insignias. Furthermore, no arrests of Nazi politicians have been made, and no deNazification program of the German population is in the works. The German economy is in shambles. The following is a speech given by a former Nazi leader at a press conference in 1946 held at an undisclosed bunker location, in response to the earlier release of footage of the death camps and the even further lowering of Germany’s standing in the eyes of the world. You have just entered . . . the Twilightenment Zone.

Good morning, everyone. Let me get right to it. Some say we tried to exterminate the Jews, that we deliberately set out to murder them, even creating so-called “death camps” to do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is, we were attacked by Poland in 1939. And this attack happened only a few years after the Communists had burned the Riechstag. We responded in both cases by defending ourselves, eventually liberating the Poles. But Britain and France declared war on us. So then we had to invade France too and liberate it to protect ourselves. Luckily, we had built up our military in the previous six years, so the Rhineland, which France had stolen from us when forcing us to sign the illegal Treaty of Versailles, Austria and Czechoslovakia asked to be liberated and become part of a new, free Germany. So we made living room for them. And Italy supported us, of course, Japan too. We even reached an agreement with the Communist leader Stalin since all we wanted was peace in our time. Our soldiers honored their country with their service, many of them sacrificing their lives in the name of freedom. These brave men and women knew Germany had to be protected. The burning of the Reichstag had changed everything. So as our cities were being bombed by the Allied aggressors night after night, we knew we had to protect our civilian populations. And we were especially concerned for the safety of our minorities, the Jews first and foremost amongst them. Outside, foreign disruptors hoping to provoke war had already staged attacks on our Jews, just as the foreign Communists burned down the Reichstag, leading us to declare a state of emergency to preserve the Weimar Republic by destroying it. Am I the only one who remembers the burning of the Reichstag?

Since our Jewish populations already lived in ghettos--they preferred to live among themselves, as you know--we began building special new vacation settlements for them outfitted with the latest enhancements and hygienic facilities, located out in the countryside and out of harm’s way. We knew the Jews were in a rush get to Palestine. Zionism was all the rage, then, you know. So we used our own military transport cars, taking away valuable military assets from our war efforts, to move them to their brand new vacation settlements. After our porters took their luggage for them, they got enhanced showers, disinfectants, haircuts, and new clothes as soon as they arrived. They even got free dental work and universal health care at the local clinics where our leading medical doctors performed break through, cutting edge, life-saving experiments. The air was fresh, and they had full employment. We were fighting a war on two fronts at the same time, you may recall. Then the Communist leader of the U.S.S.R., Joseph Stalin, broke his pact with us, forcing us to invade Russia too—and still we saved as many Jews as we could. And let me tell you, the Jews really appreciated our help getting resettled. They got to work right away, helping us build their new settlements (which some call "death camps"), which were just going to be temporary, of course, and even helping us to run them. The Jews knew that war was hard work, but that work would make them free. Sure, some people (Jews included) died along the way. But they died of natural causes. It was wartime after all, and we couldn’t exactly use first class train coaches, which would have had limited seating availability. What we did for the Jews was entirely legal.

To my critics, let me say this. Yes, there were a few bad apples among the Nazi guards we left in the enhanced settlements to help the Jews keep order and to protect the Jews in case of attack by anti-Semitic Russians or, even worse, by those racist Americans with their Indian reservations, Japanese-American internment camps, and segregated South with signs saying “whites only” and “dogs and coloreds keep off the grass.” But these bad apples in the Nazis who were helping to keep everything in order inin our settlements have been prosecuted, convicted, and punished. And, yes, it’s true that my attaché Herr Oberleutnant Libby was convicted and yet never served time for his crime. But I personally saw to it that he was never pardoned. It’s time to move forward, while always remembering the Reichstag. Now is not the time for anger. As Chancellor Bush and Minister of Propaganda Condoleezza Rice have said repeatedly, Germany does not torture, much less exterminate. We saved the Jews. Any murders of Jewish populations occurred after our watch, committed by foreign agents. Now, the present administration has taken measures to release classified documents about our war efforts. The von Stauffenberg administration is keeping Germany less safe. Let me remind you that Stalin is still running the Soviet Union and still poses a grave danger to our homeland. Remember his gulags, his mass murders, the war crimes of his soldiers? Well, History will be our judge. Future generations of Germans will look back at the past few years, remember the burning of he Reichstag, and deeply appreciate that everything we did, we did for them. There was only one leader of Germany, and we know who he was. That’s something the present administration will just never understand. Thank you.

Fux News Reports: Headline: Extermination? Or Salvation?

Some say that former Nazi Minister Cheney was an exterminator, others a savior, a Moses, if you will, helping to lead the Chosen people to their homeland. You decide! We’ll provide full coverage and fair and balanced analysis, with Minority House WhipTom “the Hammer” Delay as our guest commentator.

Breaking News: Chancellor von Stauffenberg has decided not to release any more footage of the death camps, er, settlements, for fear of endangering the German troops. He is unable to close the enhanced settlements or transfer the remaining prisoners of war, whom he continues to hold indefinitely in prolonged but not permanent detention.

Bare(ass) Life in the Swirl

As you age, you reach point where you feel that your life is in the toilet. You reach this point regardless of how happy you are with your life (you may love and desire your wife, love your kids, if you have any, love your job abd colleagues, love where your live, and so on). But let's consider that toilet metaphor. The metaphor brings with it a narrative that breaks down into three crucial moments, before the flush, after the flush, and the brief but most crucial swirl that begins the flush. In the face of impending disasters (loss of job due to budget cuts, global warming, etc) I reassure myself by thinking about the swirl. Even if someone hits flush, there's always the swirl. You can surf it even if your life now stinks and is totally going down the toilet.

It's Not you, It Is you

The experience of reading or hearing about how other people respond to Blu-ray discs on flat screen TVs has led to say that expereience" is ovr-rated. What you think is your experience is actually eceryone's. You say to the BestBuy salesman, "It has a kind of 3-D effect," as if you were making an acute observation like you might on a painting. But the salesman replies, "Oh yeah, everyone says that," thinking he is affirming what you have said. Only you don't feel affirmed. You are recognized as not you, not even as one of many, but as everyone, and this recognition obliterates the specificity of what you thought was your experience and your articulation of it. Both are mass-prodcued as much as the Blu-ray and its marketing are.