Ed Wood wuz robbed!

Poor Ed Wood. The director of such no-budget cult classics as “Glen or Glenda” and the (in)famous “Plan 9 from Outer Space” could only dream of the kind of financial success showered upon “Paranormal Activity,” the supernatural “mockumentary” that cost only $15,000 to make but has since grossed $62 million and counting. Then again, Ed didn’t have the internet or Youtube back in 1959 when “Plan 9″ was released. 

“Paranormal Activity” doesn’t have a chiropractor standing in for an expired Bela Lugosi or a Swedish professional wrestler in it, but it certainly shares Wood’s lowball aesthetic, from bad makeup and over-the-top acting (the “previous victim” sequence could’ve come from a Wood production) to ridiculous special effects (the “demon” moving the bedsheets is obviously someone turning an electric fan on and off). Its riff on our narcissistic, “all cameras on me” culture is exploitation filmmaking at its most opportunistic, but shouldn’t a horror movie be, like, scary? My threshold for fear is pretty low (a viewing of 1972’s “The Blob” kept my 9-year old self cowering under the covers every night for a week), but I found my housemates’ “MST3K”-style wisecracking far more memorable than anything in the film.

I realize, of course, that this film is not aimed at me, and it’s not legions of 41-year old men who are driving its success. In fact, my crash pad-dwelling, Ouji board-playing contemporaries and I from 20 years back would  probably have found this pretty mind-blowing, but there’s little in it that my present, demonically-atheist self could relate to. It’s probably a bit sad that the real terrors of adult life – loved ones’ medical scares, financial problems, unemployment, etc. – have left me unaffected by things that go bump in the night, but hey, who said getting older was all fun and games?

The film’s lack of polish, however, doesn’t detract from its importance as a pop-culture moment. Much as the bloggers-vs.-Dan Rather dustup of a few years back helped to legitimize a new, decentralized media, the runaway success of  ”Paranormal” is ushering in a new era of DIY filmmaking. Who needs big stars and big budgets? The younger generation has grown up in an atmosphere of “reality” TV and homemade internet viral videos, and “Paranormal” is, at its heart, an updating of classic exploitation filmmaking for the technology of a new millenium. So rest easy, Ed. Your legacy is in good hands.

An American’s war, and nobody’s fight

As President Obama faces tough choices on the imperial project in Afghanistan, he’s vexed by an old problem: Americans love to win wars, but aren’t particularly fond of fighting them, according to recent polls. While a majority of respondents support keeping the Taliban from returning to power, a (far slimmer) majority also oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan. From a general’s perspective, it’s a bit like being in favor of defeating Hitler, but protesting the invasion of Normandy.

More troops doesn’t guarantee victory of course; it didn’t help the Soviets in Afghanistan, and half a million soldiers in the field failed to win in Vietnam. The very nature of imperial wars tends to abrogate the traditional notion of “victory,” anyhow. They’re messy, and often involve long, drawn-out campaigns against a succession of foreign interlopers and local uprisings. The goal is to retain control of the colony in the long run, not unconditional surrender on the deck of a U.S. battleship. The British were very good at this sort of thing; we Americans, not so much. What we call a quagmire is what the Brits called just another day of maintaining the empire.

So what’s Obama to do? If the U.S. “loses” Afghanistan, he gets the blame; if the U.S. remains bogged down in Afghanistan, he gets the blame. The one positive thing for him is that the U.S. no longer has a functioning antiwar movement capable of bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets, and short of a return to the draft, I don’t see that reversing anytime soon. Americans will make their displeasure clear at the ballot box, though, and Democrats are already sweating about the 2010 midterm elections.

Some say Obama should take a Churchillian stance and call for for greater sacrifice from the American people when it comes to the war in Afghanistan and rally them to the cause. Americans, however, long ago internalized a kind of double-think when it comes to government services and taxes, wanting plenty of the former while protesting any of the latter. There’s no reason to suppose that they haven’t done the same on overseas military engagements: don’t draft you, don’t draft me, draft that fellow behind the tree. Oh, and don’t send me the bill either. 

So, like Harry Truman in Korea or LBJ in Vietnam, he’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. What’s needed is an honest conversation on the empire and its effects – economic, cultural and otherwise –  both at home and in the areas under our influence. Then we’d have a better idea of the pros and cons of any given strategy. But we can’t have that conversation because – God forbid! – we “don’t have an empire.”

Flight of the manipulator

I don’t get it. Hoaxes and publicity stunts are as American as P.T. Barnum, and everyone’s getting upset over Balloon Boy? As hoaxes go, this one was particularly entertaining; for an entire afternoon, everyone (including yours truly) forgot all about shrinking 401ks, growing unemployment, the quagmire in Afghanistan and the health care debate and were glued to their TVs or computer monitors, wondering if there really was a six year-old boy dangling in the bottom of that balloon. It was just the kind of mass distraction a nation involved in the midst an imperial meltdown needs. Why, Falcon Heene could be this depression’s Shirley Temple.

Granted, father Richard Heene’s idea that he can make a career out of reality television has a certain oxymoronic quality to it; if you’re playing yourself on TV for a living, can it really be “reality?” Then, of course, you could have a reality show about someone whose career is starring in reality shows, after which the snake eats its tale, the Mayan cycle ends and the universe implodes. In a society increasingly detached from reality in everything from economics to foreign policy, absurdity becomes the coin of the realm.

Then again, as minor worker in the entertainment industry, perhaps I have a soft spot for the reality-impaired. After all, it takes a ridiculous amount of narcissism and self-delusion to believe that you’ll become a successful actor, novelist or musician where so many others have failed, and naked ambition often far exceeds the talent it has been enlisted to serve. At the bottom of it, non-gender specific cajones the size of church bells are prerequisites for success in show biz.

The street hustler with his sure-fire business proposition, the surly graduate student with the world’s greatest novel on his laptop, the open mic night strummer with his dreams of being discovered as the voice of his generation; I’ve seen hundreds of these, and been one or two of them myself. If, as Richard Heene did, you invested a great deal of time and energy in pursuing the All American dream of success through media saturation, desperation eventually outweighs any qualms you might have about (metaphorically) prostituting your family and taking a media-obsessed world up, up and away in your beautiful balloon.

Empire at a crossroads

Anyone remember the “Washington Consensus?” Anyone? Clinton? Clinton?… the Washington Consensus was a set of economic recommendations made to Third World countries, particularly in Central and South America, that emphasized free trade, open markets,  fiscal responsibility and repayment of foreign debt. These “recommendations” were usually enforced by the International Monetary Fund, as the price economically-troubled countries had to pay to receive further loans. Critics claim that the Consensus was really just a post-colonial resource grab, a way of opening third-world markets to Western-based international corporations and exploiting vast pools of cheap labor, and that the recommendations forced governments to cut much-needed social programs in an effort to meet the IMF’s debt requirements. 

My, how times change. In just a little over a decade, the United States has gone from being the one who set the economic rules to having the rules imposed upon it. Only a few years ago anyone suggesting that foreign governments would be able to set compensation limits on Wall Street’s high-flying financial wizards would have been laughed out of the room; however, that’s exactly what was discussed at the G20 summit last week. Also discussed was the United State’s massive levels of debt, with calls for the dollar to replaced as the world’s reserve currency; while not likely to happen next week, the discussion serves notice that the world is already looking beyond U.S. economic dominance. 

In other empire-in-decline news, it’s becoming obvious that the U.S. is running out of the national willpower and military manpower necessary to “win” the war in Afghanistan. The national willpower part shouldn’t have been surprising to any politician who has actually studied U.S. history; the American public has never had the stomach for the kind of long-term, open-ended imperial police actions that the British were willing to tolerate, and presidents from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush have had to find this out the hard way. We want our wars short, sweet and unequivocally victorious. Now President Obama is having to rethink his Afghanistan strategy in the wake of public disaffection; with U.S.-backed Afghan president Hamid Karzai looking increasing like a mid-season replacement for Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Obama faces a choice of continuing to support the Karzai regime and further alienate the American electorate, or draw down the troops and face Republican charges of “losing” Afghanistan. Either of these choices would undermine his ambitious domestic agenda.

To his credit, Obama seems to realize that the U.S. imperial heyday is over. Recent speeches in international forums have stressed the limits of U.S. power in determining the direction of other nations’ development, and have called for more international cooperation. Much of these calls for international cooperation, however, seem designed to garner foreign support for U.S. policy aims, such as interfering in Iran.

Obama’s biggest problem in dealing with our imperial decline, however, is the fact that most Americans don’t believe we have an empire in the first place, and therefore are unable to understand how it’s disappearance affects this country economically and socially. They’re convinced that U.S. hegemony is due to our nation’s traditional values of hard work and ingenuity, and the seeming inability of these values to maintain our dominant position in the world is resulting in a crisis of national identity. While our values certainly played a role in establishing our empire, it also had a great deal to do with the U.S. government policy, often covert, of undermining or manipulating any nation that seemed to provide a countervailing influence in the world. Now, however, many of those nations, such as China, have simply become too economically powerful to ignore, and are more than capable of directing their own affairs as well as influencing other nations. 

So the question is, will we as a nation come to accept this change, and adopt policies that help us prosper in a post-imperial era, or will allow ourselves to remain shackled to delusions of our former grandeur?

Where it all began…

Perhaps what amazes me most about the popularity of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, et al, is that it was done better and funnier 20 years ago by Morton Downey Jr. Back in my semi-employed dishwasher days, I used to come home from work and switch on Channel 9 from New York, which showed Mort every weekday night (on weekends I watched “120 Minutes” and “Headbanger’s Ball” on MTV). Blowing cigarette smoke in everyone’s face, calling anyone who disagreed with him a “pablum puking liberal,” Mort – along with Weekly World News’ “columnist” Ed Anger -was the original voice of the voiceless crank-in-the-street of the post-Reagan conservative era:

Beck’s conspiratorial ramblings have nothing on Downey’s entertaining repartee with his guests, who usually gave as good as they got, as witnessed by this exchange with Gloria Allred:

You’re probably wondering why people like Allred would willingly show up on Downey’s show. Any publicity is better than no publicity, I presume, but there was this underlying sense that Downey wasn’t completely serious in his persona or politics, seeing as he was willing to discuss the hidden secrets of pro-wrestling: 

Not that Downey wasn’t willing to pit conservative against conservative either, as when Libertarian Ron Paul argued for drug legalization in the middle of the “Just say no” era:

The Morton Downey Jr. show was also one of the few places where my friends and I could see musical heroes like Joey Ramone “interviewed” on network TV:

Downey was loud, profane, provocative, theatrical, controversial and outrageous. Like most of his ilk, he eventually went too far, claiming that skinheads attacked him in an airport restroom. Following the exposure of the “attack” as a hoax, Downey’s career went into a tailspin, and he died of lung cancer in 2001. I’ve often wondered if Downey even intended for people to take the hoax seriously; given his connections to professional wrestling, perhaps it was just part of a fictional story arc. 

Looking back, the Morton Downey Jr. show was where serious TV political discussion was reduced to the level of pop culture theater, one step removed from yet-to-be-invented “reality” television or “Jerry Springer.” The days of the Phil Donahues and Dick Cavetts were numbered, replaced by the verbal brawling and partisan histrionics of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Keith Olberman. Even the parody of Stephen Colbert owes something to Downey’s over-the-top approach. 

Sadly, none of these individuals has ever paid Downey his due or cited him as a rightful influence. So here’s to you, Mort: you may not have elevated civic discussion in our nation, but you certainly have as great a claim as anyone to having created the present atmosphere of paranoia and political polarization. For those about to shout, we salute you.

Reign of idiots

Is it just me or has the dumbing down of this country increased exponentially? First Sarah Palin’s hysterics set back progress in dealing with end-of-life issues in health care; now Glenn Beck is peddling the theory that the Rockefellers were closet Bolsheviks. Are these people high? And if they are, where can I get some, cause it seems like some pretty powerful stuff.

This is what happens in end-stage empires; attempts to adapt to changing conditions are stymied by those who play to a reactionary nostalgia for a time and glory that cannot be recaptured. The result is not the return to the past that those like Palin and Beck hope for, but merely accelerated decline.

Look, I like the “good old days” as much as anyone. When I was a kid everything in our house came from the Sears catalog, and my brother and I used to wait with baited breath every fall for the Christmas edition so we could see what new “Star Wars” toys were available. The Sears catalog, of course, is history, replaced by internet shopping. That’s a bit sad, and I miss it, but you don’t see me running through the aisles of my local Sears store screaming “This isn’t my Sears store! I want my old Sears back!” Change happens, and all the paranoia and conspiracy theories aren’t going to prevent it, or turn back the clock.

This nation needs a rational health care policy. We need an educational system that recognizes that in today’s world, learning will be a lifetime endeavour, and must be affordable to all. We need to disengage from military struggles we can no longer afford to wage. The Palins, Becks, Coulters and Limbaughs have no interest in dealing with any of this, but wish only to fan the flames of willful ignorance to better their own position. Wise up, America.

Health care hooey

To all the other signs of an empire in decline we can now add politically-motivated street violence. Democracy by mob mayhem didn’t work for the Weimar Republic, but it’s not surprising that it’s come to this, given the vitriolic political polarization in this country and the disappearance of a common national narrative following the turbulent 1960s and the right-wing restoration of the 1980s. The inability of a democracy to deal with its problems through civil discourse is a sign that its institutions have become dysfunctional, its ruling mandarins no longer able to rise above the demands of their constituencies and find common solutions. In short, we’re fucked.

To all the Tea Partyers, freepers, conspiracy theorists and others who are disrupting these meetings: thanks for your concern over our nation’s direction, but where were you when U.S. manufacturing jobs were moving overseas, taking their healthcare plans with them, and leaving behind low-paying service sector jobs whose health benefits often resemble a $2 parachute – you got it, but God knows what will happen if you try to use it?  

Oh, I see. That’s not your problem, you say. “Rugged individualism” and all that crap. Well, never mind the fact that rugged individualism really only applied to Hudson Bay Company fur traders and the like living far beyond the reaches of civilization, that all of us rely on each other for some form of social support, however indirectly. I don’t want to pay for someone else’s healthcare, you say.

Well, you already are. Let me count the ways:

1. Higher medical costs: You don’t really think that doctors and hospitals are going to just eat the losses caused by treating the uninsured, do you? No, they just add them on to the bill of those who can pay, resulting in…

2. Higher insurance premiums: Last time I looked, the Salvation Army wasn’t handling my health insurance, so I assume these companies are out there to make a profit. Therefore, when doctors and hospitals charge them more to cover the uninsured, they pass the costs on to you.

3. Emergency response costs: People who don’t have health insurance are less likely to go to the doctor, and therefore often don’t get treated before their condition becomes serious. When they have that avoidable heart attack, someone has to get in an ambulance and go save them, and that someone is usually an EMT paid for by your local tax dollars. 

4. Lower home values: A majority of bankruptcies are caused by people, including many with health insurance, being unable to pay medical bills. Since many people who declare bankruptcy wind up losing their homes, more houses are dumped on an already oversaturated market, contributing to falling home values.

So there you go. We can either figure out a way to pay for everyone’s health care up front, or we can all pay for it eventually. As with most “pay now or pay later” scenarios, paying now is usually the cheaper option.

But the noisy protests at town hall meetings have to do with more than just health care, I would suspect. President Obama doesn’t look like all of our previous presidents, personal economic security is much more tenuous these days, the government is encouraging us to buy smaller cars like the Europeans drive – the health care debate is just the trigger for unleashing fears that many Americans have about our nation’s decline and the burgeoning suspicion that maybe we’re not immune to the same factors that governed the rise and fall of previous empires. Whatever happened to our American exceptionalism?

To be continued…

Ya gotta stay young…

What is age? Am I too old to be doing this, blogging in the middle of the night while waiting for an 18-piece brass band to show up and crash on my floor? Too old to be playing gigs with bands of musicians young enough to be my kids? Too old to be starting my own business as a freelance photographer and sound engineer? Too old to rock n’ roll?

We’ve always been a culture that worshipped the young and virile, those with the strength to light out for new frontiers and no baggage to hold them back. Even more so today, it seems that success relies on one’s ability to constantly integrate new technologies and social structures into one’s life, attributes more associated with resilient youth than with edge-of-middle-age’rs such as myself. There’s no laurels to rest on anymore; just when you think you’ve struggled hard enough to take a well-deserved break, your industry disappears, or you’re replaced by someone who’s twice as tech-savvy at half the cost. 

So what happens in a world where we’re all Madonnas or David Bowies, reinventing ourselves every 15 minutes for new platforms, new technologies, new markets, new online communities? Who was I then? Who am I now? Fifteen years ago I was a factory worker, six years ago I was an award-winning journalist, today I’m a photographer and sound engineer. Everyone one of those identities is/was real, but what do they add up to?

I never bought an ipod, I kept my turntable, but now I hear vinyl’s coming back. The TV shows I watched in the 1970s have been turned into big budget blockbusters watched by teenagers. Nothing ever changes, yet everything does. I went from Myspace to Facebook, but I ain’t tweeting, or twittering, or whatever the fuck they call it. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

I’m getting nostalgic for the ’50s and ’60s, my parents’ decades. Shopping malls, Bob Hope, all that pre-ironic all-American stuff. If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t my cell phone work inside my house?

Too little, too late?

Our nation’s leaders may finally be realizing what’s been obvious to the American working class for the last 30 years: the free traders are wrong, and a nation’s economic policy must exist, first and foremost, to benefit its own citizens, not the CEOs of international corporations. From the article:

Manufacturing has long been viewed as an essential pillar of a powerful economy. It generates millions of well-paid jobs for those with only a high school education, a huge segment of the population. No other sector contributes more to the nation’s overall productivity, economists say. And as manufacturing weakens, the country becomes ever more dependent on imports of merchandise, computers, machinery and the like — running up a trade deficit that in time could undermine the dollar and the nation’s capacity to sustain so many imports.

Thank you. Tom Friedman and other apologists for globalization are no doubt rushing to their computers to post rebuttals, but the above paragraph pretty much lays out how manufacturing jobs lead to a prosperous middle class. And when those jobs disappear, to be replaced by low-paying service jobs, so do the hallmarks of a middle class society: home ownership, decent medical care, an affordable education for one’s children, the ability to save for the years when one was no longer able to work. In short, everything that separates the United States from one of those countries where society is continuously polarized between the handful of haves on the top and the hordes of have-nots on the bottom.

The free traders were wrong. The manufacturing jobs that went overseas were not replaced by better-paying white collar jobs. In fact, the white collar jobs quickly went overseas as well, aided by new communications technologies such as the internet. The idea that people in China and India were only fit to do assembly-line labor, while the more cerebral jobs would stay in the U.S., is, at it’s core, fundamentally racist. If a person in India can be taught to run a punch press, they can be taught to write computer code. And the fact that they will do it for less money virtually ensures that someone will teach them to do it.

Oh well, say the free traders, Americans will just have to better educate themselves. But what about the millions of Americans who lack the desire or inclination to pursue a four-year college degree? According to the free traders, industries will go to the countries that most suit their needs. Well, should we do the same with the workers then? Perhaps those that fail to get an education beyond high school should be loaded onto boats and sent to China, or Indonesia, to work alongside the people there on the world’s new “factory floor.” After all, what’s the point of keeping them here, seeing as how we’ve made their role in the workforce obsolete? 

The smart nations, the ones that stayed on top, have always regarded economic policy as an adjunct to military and diplomatic policy, a way to wage war by other means, as Clausewitz would say. China and other emerging nations understand that; does the United States?

A permanent dole?

With unemployment growing, many economists are predicting a “jobless recovery,” where economic growth does nothing to alleviate the lack of jobs. If this is indeed the case, it would be the third economic recovery in a row that did not result in significant job creation.

Maybe we’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope here. Perhaps the lack of jobs has nothing to do with cyclical boom-and-bust cycles created by Wall Street bubbles, but is a long-term trend that has been handily blamed on the recessions in an effort to disguise it’s true origins.

Free trade fanatics don’t want to admit it, but much of those job losses, particularly in the manufacturing sector, are due to globalization. Free traders claim that the jobs lost will be replaced by new jobs in yet-to-be discovered technologies (flying cars, anyone?), but let’s be real: if it’s cheaper for a company to hire a guy in India or China to program computer code or build cars, it’ll ultimately be cheaper to have them build solar arrays and electricity-generating windmills as well. 

To paraphrase General George S. Patton, no bastard ever won by opening his country to free trade, he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard open his country to free trade. Every nation that became a world economic power did it by protecting nascent national industries from foreign competition with tariffs and protectionist measures. The British did it, the United States did it, Japan did it and China is doing it now.

So we should probably get used to a permanently high unemployment rate, just as the British and the French did when their empires, and their economic ascendancy, waned. 

The concept of free trade is good in the abstract. But as long as nations like China regard trade policy as merely another tool in their quest to increase their international power (much as the Western imperial powers once did), the United States can’t afford such a naive approach.