TELLS THE FACTS AND NAMES THE NAMES VOLUME 21 NUMBER 10, 2014 l S School ofMora The Bl The S Game:NFLF The Brain The Decay ofAmericanMediaBy Pa t an Tha ood y Hist t Neverwa ory ofC t a tecraf aces Thir d anLong By Davi d Macaray s: ChinaandtheUy o tt on b t b y ChrisFl y LeeBallinger rick L. Smith trick L. oyd ghur s b y PeterLee Contact Information Subscriptions CounterPunch Business Office 1- year print edition $55 www.counterpunch.org PO Box 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 1- year digital edition (PDF) $35 CounterPunch Magazine , Volume 21, Toll Free 1 (800) 840-3683 1- year print & digital edition $65 (ISSN 1086-2323) is a journal of progres- 1 (707) 629-3683 1- year institutions/supporters $100 sive politics, investigative reporting, civil editorial: 1- year print for student/low income $45 liberties, art, and culture published by The 1-year digital for student/low income $30 Institute for the Advancment of Journal- [email protected] istic Clarity, 631 Chambers Road, Petrolia, business: [email protected] All subscription orders must be pre- California, 95558.Visit counterpunch. suscriptions and merchandise: paid — we do not invoice for orders. Renew org to read dozens of new articles daily, [email protected] by telephone, mail, or on our website. purchase subscriptions, order books, plus For mailed orders please include name, address and email address with payment, access 18 years of archives. Submissions or call CounterPunch accepts a small number of 1 (800) 840-3683 or 1 (707) 629-3683. Periodicals postage pending at Eureka, submissions from accomplished authors Add $20.00 per year for subscriptions California. and newer writers. Please send your pitch mailed to Canada and $40 per year for all POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: to [email protected]. Due other countries outside the US. CounterPunch to the large volume of submissions we re- P.O. Box 228 ceive we are able to respond to only those Please do not send checks or money Petrolia, CA 95558 that interest us. orders in currency other than U.S. dollars. We do accept debit cards and credit cards ISSN 1086-2323 (print) Advertising from banks outside the US that have the ISSN 2328-4331 (digital) Advertising space is available in Counter- Visa, Mastercard or other major card www.counterpunch.org Punch Magazine. Media kit available upon insignias. All rights reserved. request. All advertisements are subject Make checks or to the publisher’s approval of copy, text, money orders payable to: CounterPunch editor-in-chief display, and illustration. CounterPunch Business Office Jeffrey St. Clair reserves the right to reject or cancel any advertisement at any time. PO Box 228 MANAGING EDITOR Petrolia, CA 95558 Joshua Frank email [email protected] CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Address Change Lee Ballinger, Melissa Beattie, Darwin Please notify us immediately of email and/ Bond-Graham, Chloe Cockburn, Windy or mailing address changes for uninter- Send Letters to the Editor to: Cooler, Chris Floyd, Kevin Alexander upted delivery of issues. CounterPunch Gray, Steve Horn, Lee Hall, Conn Hallinan, PO Box 228 Barbara Rose Johnson, Binoy Kampmark, By Mail: CounterPunch Business Office Petrolia, CA 95558 JoAnn Wypijewski, David Macaray, Chase or email : Madar, Kim Nicolini, Brenda Norrell, PO Box 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 [email protected] Vijay Prashad, Louis Proyect, Martha by Phone: Rosenberg, Christine Sheeler, Jan Tucker, 1 (800) 840-3683 Mike Whitney 1 (707) 629-3683 Poetry Editor By Email (preferred): Marc Beaudin [email protected] Cover Image: Brain Game by Nick Roney SOCIaL MEDIA EDITOR Donations Nathaniel St. Clair CounterPunch’s survival is dependent BUSINESS MANAGER & DESIGN PRODUCTION upon income from subscriptions, dona- Becky Grant tions and book and merchandise sales. We are a non-profit, tax exempt organization SUBSCRIPTIONS & ORDER FULFILLMENT under The Institute for the Advancement Deva Wheeler of Journalistic Clarity, DBA Counter- DESIGN CONSULTATION Punch. Donations are welcome year round. In Memory of Tiffany Wardle Donate by mail, telephone or online: www. Alexander Cockburn counterpunch.org. 1941–2012 table of contents letters to the editor ...... 4 columns

Roaming Charges ...... 5 The Age of SurrealPolitick articles by Jeffrey St. Clair The Decay of American Media Why the Democrats deserved to lose. Diamonds and Rust ...... 6 by Patrick L. Smith...... 10 Vindication of Love The Brain Game: NFL Faces Third and Long by JoAnn Wypijewski Reclaiming the life of Bernard Baron. by David Macaray...... 14 Empire Burlesque ...... 7 The Stan that Never Was: China and the Uyghurs School of Moral Statecraft by Peter Lee ...... 19 by Chris Floyd Finger-wagging at the Kremlin.

Grasping at Straws ...... 8 culture & reviews Washington’s Enemies The Bloody History of Cotton List by Mike Whitney by Lee Ballinger...... 24 On the Demon Vladimir Putin. Day Dream Nation...... 9 Laura Poitras’s Surveillance Trilogy: Under The Radiation Zone Western Eyes by Kristin Kolb by Kim Nicolini ...... 26 Notes from the waiting room.

COUNTERPUNCH VOLUME 21 NUMBER 10, 2014 aesthetic success) with some of them, I would reply - all instru- letters to the editor ments are very demanding if played well; the real test is how easy it is to get away with slop- Socialism, The Future Of food. Modern industrial food eradicated. Let’s get realistic py, technically inferior playing Lee Ballinger writes in his transportation systems have and look to political forms that - and I would rate the trumpet article “Dreaming the Future” arisen to satisfy this desire. can limit the damage. near the top in terms of that in Counter Punch Volume 21 A brief look at the begin- This is indeed what the facility. The most demanding Number 9 an introduction that ning of industrialism, the founders of the USA attempted instrument I ever tried - and begins with pre-agricultural so-called Industrial Revolution, to do with the Constitution— failed on - is the clarinet. It has humans living lives of subsis- reveals that it was founded on provide a form of governance no inherent logic to the keys; tence and desperation. From the confluence of a wealth of that minimized the chances the two registers are virtu- which he moves on to the early natural resources (iron, coal, of the mis-use of power. They ally two instruments; and it is agriculturalists, a few of which water), scientific endeavors themselves accepted the natu- unforgiving to sloppy embou- had the time to consider the that built, for example, a work- ral domination of free white chures. meaning of life. And the advent able steam engine, and money male landowners, a hegemony The ending of the Burns series of industry that promised to realized from the slave-driven that has been gradually re- was particularly stupid. Why solve the problems of scarcity. sugar trade. Many steam-pow- duced through consititutional focus on Dexter Gordon? Sure, He ends with a discussion of ered factories were built with amendments. he was a fine player, in an era the ability of modern technol- the sugar wealth by working- I believe the dilemma when they were becoming ogy to eliminate scarcity and of class men who became quite faced by America today is the scarce - something on which the possible role of dreaming in rich from their efforts. The result of the intrusion of the you and I will have to agree to shaping a socialism for today. fate of the factory workers was economic system of Capitalism disagree. But to depict him as Bunk. much different: forced off their into government. The success the savior of the idiom and the The tens of thousands of land and into the factories by of capitalism in the 1800s was icon of a jazz revival is absurd. years of modern human exis- government soldiers and kept its superiority over the aristoc- Also I find this search for tence that predated agriculture there by laws, they lived lives of racy. Today it is its superiority the grand father-figure that were composed of popula- subsistence and desperation. over democracy. ran through the series to be tions that grew, supported the Industrialism did not, in Susan Dorey, San Rafael, CA silly. There seems little scope specialization of work (clothes my readings at least, promote for disagreement that in the All That Jazz and medicine), groups that itself with the lure of the roster of greats, Armstrong moved to follow the availability dispatch of scarcity. Indeed, it I have been thinking for some and Ellington rank high. But of food, both plant and animal, created its own. time about St. Clair’s Oct. 31 that roster is neither cardinal traded for rare substances like essay on Ken Burns and his nor even ordinal. There are salt obtained at great distances, The socialistic notion of “from jazz series, the gist of which I others whose influence was and left luminous paintings each according to his ability to agree with. But I would make demonstrably huge in different deep in caves. Paintings that each according to his needs” the principal sinner Wynton directions, but there is no way evoke in us questions of the is a fantasy. No amount of Marsalis, an inveterate self- of really assigning an overall meaning of life. dreaming, drug-induced or promoter, whom I remember ranking. People, especially those otherwise, will bring this into Oscar Peterson brushing off Lastly, I guess, while Burns that live close to their food a functioning, enduring way as a dilettante who can’t make - and Marsalis – certainly fall supply, know that food scarcity of life. up his mind where he wants to into the category of musical happens: the food supply is Lenin’s ideas of socialism, base his musical legacy. hero worshipers, their biggest interrupted by weather, natural perhaps the most pure form I was particularly struck in sin seems to me to try to wor- disasters, and human inter- ever attempted, lasted five years the Burns series by one of the ship their own self-declared vention. Families and larger after the Russian Revolution “interminable” interviews with genius. And to me that, not groups have been migrating for until they were co-opted by Marsalis in which he claims their occasional deprecation of all of human existence follow- Stalin and others. To me this that the trumpet is the most a lot of post-1970s jazz (about ing their food supply. It’s our illustrates the all-too-human demanding of jazz instru- which I share some of their determination to stay put in desire for power and wealth. ments! Just by the remotest skepticism) is their real offense. It is not realistic to think that coincidence it happens to be our homes that is often at odds RT Naylor, Montreal, Quebec with the local availability of this desire, and the other of his instrument. As someone the seven deadly sins, can be who monkeyed (without much 4 ists, dot.com tycoons and arms manu- roaming charges facturers, private equity sharks and union-busting CEOs, nuclear energy The Age of SurrealPolitick zealots and the shock troops of the Israel lobby. We have officially entered By Jeffrey St. Clair the age of SurrealPolitick. Even though the prickly word “in- I have a soft spot for Harry Reid. Not teously irked by the president’s callous equality” rarely surfaced in the fall cam- for his politics, which remain mostly condemnations. After all, the turnout paigns, it is almost an inviolate rule of retrograde, but for the man. He is pug- from white progressives, women and American politics that all elections, nacious and unvarnished, a real street unionists was equally deflated. Still the when you drill into the deep demo- fighter. Reid has a voice like scratched American underclass should have taken graphic strata, are about the economy. vinyl, but he is a straight shooter, who credit for the debacle. After all, they’ve Obama’s recovery is an illusion manu- rarely speaks cryptically. When he takes endured the most savage body blows factured by shopworn parlor tricks from a stand, he doesn’t flinch under fire. from the Obama incumbency across the the Federal Reserve. Few are buying it In a time of political clones, Reid is past six bleak years. any more. The economy remains entro- an original, a working-class Westerner, After the coast-to-coast trouncing, pic, the heat steadily leaking away. The whose mother, Inez, was a laundress Obama remained in a desultory state mood of the nation is sour. The country and father a miner, who killed himself as he plotted his next move, the presi- is mired in a kind of slow-motion dis- during a period of prolonged unem- dent as somnambulist. Rarely has a solution. ployment. Reid grew up in the desert major political figure taken such pride But I am ever the optimist. I think outpost of Searchlight, in a company in thinking long and deeply over policy this election was about more than the hovel without a toilet or a telephone. matters only to arrive at dumb and un- dismal economic circumstances. I He put himself through college and law inspired decisions. believe the election was a mass expres- school and clawed his way through the Take Obama’s post-election executive sion of contempt: for Obama, for the hard-scrabble terrain of Nevada politics action on immigration. At best it was a Democrats, for the whole rancid system from the ground up. half-measure, which explicitly exempt- that promises hope and delivers only In sum, Harry Reid embodies every ed the more than two million people deprivation and more war. Sooner or quality Barack Obama lacks. Thus it deported by Obama himself. This was later the bill for these betrayals comes didn’t surprise me that Reid dumped followed by Obama’s timorous and in- due. A price must be paid. most of the blame for the annihila- choate response to Ferguson, where he The contradictions of the Democratic tion of the Democrats in the elections couldn’t muster an authentic sentiment Party have reached the cracking point. at Obama’s doorstep. Obama, as if of moral disgust. Blacks and Hispanics Who would defend a party which paralyzed by some deep psychologi- have many reason to feel enraged about refuses to defend it’s own most vulner- cal fissure, refuses to battle for his own the president’s indifferent attitude able adherents? Who would defend a policies, even when the fate of his own toward the cruel circumstances of their party that sedulously squelches each party hangs in the balance. Reid, the lives. new spark of idealist fervor, from former boxer, can’t stomach such timid- The Democrats’ death embrace with Occupy Wall Street to the Dream ity at times of crisis. Reid is right about neoliberalism has gone almost unchal- Defenders, while maniacally pursuing Obama, if not for all the right reasons. lenged since the rise of Jimmy Carter, job-killing trade pacts like the TPP? It For his part, Obama, visibly dazed the grip tightening with each successive should be torn asunder, before it col- by the losses, inexplicably cast blame election. Now it has all but strangled lapses from its own internal state of on Latino and black voters, slamming the life out of the party. The victims decay. the low turnout among minority voters. of neoliberalism once constituted the Barack Obama offered himself as an He all but called them lazy and ungrate- Democrats’ popular base. Now the outsider, a new kind of political figure, ful. One might be tempted to read this Party has become a tomb for its ancient who would challenge the prevailing bizarre outburst as a kind of subliminal New Deal factions and all the hedge forces of corporate thievery and mili- self-loathing, a form of toxic projec- fund dark money in the world won’t tary adventurism. In the end, he proved tion. There is a vindictive quality to the summon the old troops back to life. to be their unapologetic agent. Obama persona that strikes out most vi- In their place, the mandarins of the That then is the tragedy of Obama, ciously at those who he believes should DNC have welcomed some of the most the president who wouldn’t stand his love him the most. malign forces on the American political ground. From his fall, let a new resis- Blacks and Hispanics were righ- scene: bond traders and venture capital- tance rise. cp

5 off his pantleg through the day, joining diamonds and rust a marching band from the sidelines of a parade, dancing down the street in his tucked-up summer outfit. The child Vindication of Love with a keen sense of his own body, his By JoAnn Wypijewski own appearance—“his way,” she called it—this child would have to endure, later, rapes and beatings and moment- to-moment punishment of the senses. Dave Colarusso is not accustomed victed and put away as a dangerous He would put on love, as they say, and to a stage. Most people aren’t, actu- pervert during America’s Satanic panic he would save his soul. ally. Then death comes to someone years. That was in Pittsfield in 1984. His Perhaps he was always campy, close, and they rise, or fall, to the oc- trial was a sham, a fact affirmed by a Bertha’s “special boy.” But once inside, casion. Dave looked out at the crowd court after years of dedicated advocacy camp became his armor, his assertion at Bernard Baran’s memorial and said, coordinated by the National Center for of himself, even if the lines of self and “Loving Bee was the easiest thing I’ve Reason and Justice. Baran was released stylization might blur in performance. ever done”; said it plain and pure the in 2006. He was 41. He died suddenly As with the tough guy, the ascetic, the way a person might who has known one on September 1, 2014, at 49. wise one, the camp performance—to true feeling in life and still can’t quite The accusations were a travesty, one who bothers to know himself—is believe his luck. fueled by homophobia and family crisis. a multi-hued jacket, protective but re- The two had met in a Massachusetts Lately it has emerged that the pros- vealing, too. Twenty-one years Bee penitentiary, first as friends, the one ecutor, Daniel Ford, withheld from the was inside for something he didn’t do, supporting the other in an ugly place, defense exculpatory unedited video- longer than he’d known life outside. At where Dave, so it seemed, had been taped interviews with the purported final count, he would dance back into in greater danger of sinking. Not that child victims. Stoking hysteria vaulted his cell before the awful clang of the Bee was safe. He was a slight kid of 19 Ford to higher things; he became a door shutting him in for the night. He when he was sentenced to three con- Superior Court judge five years after did not dance because he was happy, secutive life terms, and he suffered robbing Bee of his youth. As Harvey but he was happy still to love dancing. almost immediately. But he also set his Silverglate, one of Baran’s appeals When Bee’s straight older brother mind against theft, soul-theft, the final lawyers, argues, Ford should be stripped spoke, he asked his wife to stand near. triumph of the violence system that of his post. Any prosecutor who pursues Her hand was on his shoulder as the landed him where he was. Dave he took a wrongful conviction and breaks rules stocky man quivered. In childhood, he by the hand, rescued, and one day they of trial should face consequences. said, he took it as his job to protect Bee found they were in love. The case always deserved more at- from the cruelty of other kids. He is He hath sent me to heal the broken- tention, but in life it never outshone the plagued—and this he never managed to hearted, to preach deliverance to the man. In death, Dave Colarusso’s talk, say while Bee lived—by the knowledge captives, and recovering of sight to the especially, rescued Bee’s memory from that he could not protect him from the blind, to set at liberty them that are the amber of corruption. greatest cruelty; but struck, too, think- bruised. “We took our love serious,” Dave said. ing now that his little gay brother had In the photograph projected large His Fitchburg accent bore the weight been far stronger than he, far tougher, against a wall beside the stage, Bee is of his own lost years. How long had he and for that realization, along with his free and beautiful. It is summertime, been imprisoned? Massachusetts still immense loss, he wept. probably in Boston, maybe at a Pride produces people who talk this way, but “We took our love serious.” parade; he is wearing a baseball cap, the accent is moving to the margins. In so many ways external life makes tank top and a countenance of joyous Dave, a working-class man, an ex-con, love hard. So many ways we deceive goodness. a homosexual, speaking tenderly of ourselves that love is secondary to If you have never heard the name, I his love, their love and life, in public, politics or work or oppression; that it suppose you want to know what Baran without euphemism, was speaking the can come later, after we’ve handled the was in for. I suppose I must explain, oldest language of all. really important matters, once we’ve though that was neither the focus of the From the same stage, Baran’s mother, sprung the prison bars of the Man’s or memorial nor the reason for my telling Bertha Shaw, described her gay child: a our own construction. There is no later, this story now. 6-year-old appearing at the top of the only now. This is the final gift from one Bernard Baran was the first day care stairs just-so in white trousers before an brave and brazen man. We love, or we worker to be falsely prosecuted, con- amusement park outing, brushing dirt perish. cp 6 idea that you cannot criticize your own empire burlesque country’s dangerous policies without automatically being a supporter (or School of Moral Statecraft “lover”) of the regimes targeted by those policies is primitive and puerile in the By Chris Floyd extreme—which, naturally, makes it the prevailing attitude in America’s super- sophisticated and deeply nuanced po- litical discourse today. Although we live in an age of out- government in Ukraine (entering into That Putin’s Kremlin regime is vile rages that keep the mind in a state of an alliance with armed, avowedly neo- should go without saying. In fact, it continual embogglement, it was still fascist factions to bring about the final is more vile than most of our newfan- something of a shock to see the brazen blow)...this is the man who had the gled Cold Warriors know. Their main hypocrisy displayed by the Lords of DU-plated brass to publicly admonish objection to Putin is that he does not the West last month when they “con- another national leader in these terms: show proper, cowering deference to fronted” Vladimir Putin at the five-star “We’re also very firm on the need American dictates on foreign policy and freakshow known as the G20. As the to uphold core international prin- economic exploitation. If he got with breathless headlines in the entirely free ciples, and one of those principles is the Potomac program, if he kowtowed and not-at-all government-influenced you don’t invade other countries or to the “Washington consensus” and let Western media related, the paragons of finance proxies and support them in our big dogs eat anywhere and every- the “Anglosphere” lined up to deliver ways that break up a country that has where they like, why then, our leaders some stark home truths to the Russian mechanisms for democratic elections.” would still be looking deep into his eyes honcho about his wanton “interfer- Never let it be said that the American and seeing a soulmate, as Diddly did in ence” in the sovereign affairs of another elite doesn’t have a sense of humor. For days of old. country. not only was the leader of the world’s But they could not give a damn No doubt the Kremlin mountain- chief invader, intervener and subverter about the actual lives of actual Russian eer was shaking in his boots from the of other nations—including Ukraine people. They were happy to see mil- tongue-lashings ladled out by the pasty- —hawking this hypocrisy in public, he lions of Russians go under in the neo- faced PR flack, David Cameron, the was delivering it as a criticism of un- liberal “Shock Doctrine” unleashed gibbering, land-raping woman-hating seemly intervention in...Ukraine! This by the properly deferential Yeltsin ad- twit, Tony Abbot, and that oozing mass comedy tour-de-force recalls the bril- ministration. And if Vlad got his mind of bile in a suit, Stephen Harper. (Oh, liant work of Obama’s predecessor, right with the Man, they would just as there were giants in those days, our George Diddly Bush, who used to leave happily turn a blind eye to the depre- grandchildren will surely say of the ‘em laughing in the aisles with his blasts dations of today’s Putinistan—a ghastly heroes who walk among us.) at “foreign nations interfering in Iraq” conglomerate of Tea Party crankery, But the squeakings of these pips —even as he was happily killing thou- authoritarian religiosity in the Saudi were as sounding brass or tinkling sands of innocent Iraqis with a foreign manner, and old-fashioned hardball oli- cymbal to the moral thunder of the invading army. These guys are a riot. garchism, in the Rockefeller-Morgan- Prince of Peace his own self, Barack But perhaps we should tread more Koch-Omidyar style. Nobel Obama, when he took his turn lightly here. After all, in our brave new The situation on the ground is grim at the stern finger-wagging. A man Cold War world, to utter criticism of the in Russia right now, as my friends there who for six years has directed a world- Ukrainian upheaval is to find oneself can amply testify. But the West’s ag- wide campaign of drone terrorism, lambasted as a “Putin apologist” or a gressive machinations only intensify reserving the right to intervene in any “blinkered Russophile” foolishly swal- the siege mentality that ‘justifies’ au- country, anywhere, with deadly force, lowing Kremlin propaganda...and prob- thoritarian rule. (A dynamic running with public bombs and private murder, ably in the pay of Kremlin gold. rampant in the Western ‘democracies’ a man who began his term by green- This tedious reaction is as old as as well.) Putin might be a putz, but as lighting a brutal coup in Honduras that the hills, of course. I’m sure that when a “threat” to “core international prin- overthrew a democratically elected gov- Cato the Elder (the John McCain of ciples,” he is an absolute piker next to ernment and ushered in a reign of soci- ancient Rome) ended every speech our pious Western paladins, whose in- ety-devouring crime and chaos, a man with “Furthermore, Carthage must terventions and proxies have brought who joined with hand-picked oligarchs be destroyed!” anyone who objected whole nations (Libya, Syria, Iraq, et to pour $5 billion into a campaign to was invariably denounced as a “Punic al) to violent ruin—and promise to set overthrow the democratically elected apologist” or a “Didoist appeaser.” The many more aflame. cp 7 ed “a new architecture for economic grasping at straws relations requiring an alternative global financial center that will make the ruble Washington’s Enemies List the reserve currency.” He added that the World Trade Organization, the World By Mike Whitney Bank and the IMF are “archaic, un- democratic and inflexible” and do not “ reflect the new balance of power.” So in less than 24 hours, Putin had Vladimir Putin might be the most less aggressor and a warmonger. Just last blasted all the institutions respon- popular leader of our time. According week numerous articles reported that “a sible for America’s exalted position as to a survey conducted by the Levada column of 32 Russian tanks and truck- the world’s only superpower. Is it any Center in August, the Russian loads of troops” had been sent over the wonder why Washington decided to put President’s public approval ratings stand border to help “pro-Russian separatists.” him on the enemies list? at a towering 87 percent, the highest of Moscow quickly denied the claims and Even so, Putin has never backed any leader in the world today. Putin’s said the reports were nonsense, but the down. In fact, he’s gotten more blunt popularity has been boosted by domes- damage had been done. Hours later, the as time goes by. In a speech last month tic policies which have revitalized the Pentagon acknowledged that the report at Valdai Club, he accused the U.S. of Russian economy, lifted millions out of was false and that there was “no evi- jettisoning the global security system, poverty, improved education, expand- dence” of a Russian invasion. Readers that’s been in place since World War II, ed health care and the strengthened who follow developments in Ukraine and replacing it with nothing. “Having the pension system. He’s also credited closely, know that the big-name news declared itself the winner of the Cold with having brought Russia back from organizations run fake reports like this War”, the U.S. no longer feels like it has the brink of disaster following years of all the time. It’s a type of information to play by the rules. It simply pursues misrule under the drunken Yeltsin who warfare intended to turn public opinion its own interests without the slightest allowed the country to be looted by vo- against Russia and Putin. And it works, regard for the laws that have been put in racious oligarchs and their neoliberal too. In a recent survey, Gallup found place to minimize aggression. allies from the U.S. In short, Putin has that “Americans’ views of Russia and “International law has been forced to been good for Russia and the Russian Putin are the worst in years”. A full 63% retreat over and over by the onslaught of people are appreciative. of Americans view Putin unfavorably. legal nihilism,” said Putin. “Objectivity But while Putin may be widely This is the power of propaganda. and justice have been sacrificed on the admired in his own country, the reverse Washington’s animus towards Putin altar of political expediency. Arbitrary is true in the U.S. where politicians can be traced back to a speech he gave interpretations have replaced legal and the media berate him at every op- in Munich on February 12, 2007. This norms. At the same time, total control portunity calling him a KGB thug, a is where he lambasted the “unipolar of the mass media has made it possible coldblooded autocrat or a “new Hitler.” world” model as “pernicious” and de- to portray white as black and black as Why is that? Why is Putin loved by nounced the U.S.’s self-serving supervi- white.” Russians but reviled by Americans? sion of global security. How can anyone dispute this? Even In the U.S., public perceptions are “Today we are witnessing a nearly- the idea of national sovereignty, which largely shaped by what people read in uncontained hyper-use of military force is the cornerstone of international re- the media. But the U.S. media is univer- in international relations, force that is lations, has been thrown on the scra- sally hostile towards Putin because they plunging the world into an abyss of per- pheap. The United States simply refuses see him as a threat to their interests. manent conflicts,” Putin said. “We are to accept any higher authority than Putin has repeatedly criticized the way seeing a greater and greater disdain for itself. As George Bush senior said fol- the U.S. conducts its foreign policy and the basic principles of international law. lowing the fall of the Berlin Wall, from he has taken steps to curb U.S. power by One state...has overstepped its national now on, “What we say goes.” While that forming critical alliances that challenge borders in every way...And of course maxim might work for Washington, it’s America’s dominant role in the world. this is extremely dangerous. It results in hardly a credible blueprint for global se- Naturally, Washington is not happy the fact that no one feels safe. I want to curity. about this, which is why the media emphasize this—no one feels safe.” Putin is right, we need a rules-based has been deployed to demonize Putin The day after Munich, Putin de- system that will help prevent, manage whenever they can. livered another blistering salvo at an or resolve crises. Otherwise, we’re The war in Ukraine has created many International Economic Forum in St doomed. cp opportunities to smear Putin as a reck- Petersburg. In that speech, he demand-

8 daydream nation The Radiation Zone By Kristin Kolb

The waiting room for radiation and eye candy to keep me from think- cinnamon rolls and drinks. “No thanks. therapy at the cancer centre is either a ing about the machine I meet every I’m off caffeine and sugar.” frightening tunnel of doom, or a self- morning, alone, with alarms blaring. Then I was accosted by the partner help coffee klatch (“Laughter is the best Jenni Diski has been writing flaw- of a woman with my exact same cancer. medicine, chuckle, chuckle!”), depend- lessly in the London Review of Books She’s an “energy healer” and told me ing on the day of the week. No matter lately about her cancer treatment. I my aura was “dark blue” – I’m obvi- what the ambience, cable news plays in can’t compete or compare. I never met ously lonely and she had to “block my front of us – cancer patients and care- Doris Lessing. Just a plebian here. But light.” givers. one thing she mentions is that she’s This was when the media in my I’ve now submitted myself, arms never watched another person die. home state of Missouri was sitting and fixed, eyes open, to the machine fueled And having cancer is her first real ex- spinning, waiting for a riot. by Cobalt 60 some 13 times. There are perience with bodily decline, watching I went in and got zapped to fucking 15 more sessions planned. The radio- herself die. Foreigner on the radio. therapy device looks like a large, old- I can understand this. My mother is A few days later, the waiting room school telephone that maneuvers ser- healthier than I am. As is this rest of the was quiet, and I listened to New York pentine around my body, zapping my family. My grandparents died in their Mayor Bill de Blasio soft-rock his way chest at three different angles. On the 80s from what we used to call “old age.” through a speech about the horrifying computer monitor, I see what reminds Then there is my father. I was es- death of Eric Garner, then I got zapped me of my own 3D death mask on the tranged from him when he died. My to Air Supply. screen, to remind the technicians of half-sister saw a “selfie” I took after my “I can’t breathe,” Garner wheezed. the precise angles and calculations re- hair started growing back, and then I don’t have to tell you the scene. You quired for the proper beam. sent me a photo of him shortly after he know. “Just move your arm a teeny 2 was diagnosed with lung cancer at 75. Neither can I. My heart is a mess. But degrees in, Kristin, and hold it.” That He is sitting at his epic wooden desk, I have a choice to stop it, the treatment, way we miss your heart. DO NOT in front of his law books. His hands don’t I? Go to naturopaths, Vitamin C touch the machine. Don’t move, but are crossed, “oak-like” according to my injections, yoga, et al. That’s for rich breathe.” friend, Jim Lipton. But his eyes deceive folk. Then the techs scurry away, bolt the him. They are full of both strength and I can tell you one thing. My cancer foot-wide metal door, the red alarm sorrow. My sister, Keily, sent it to me to treatment has been endless surprises. lights up, and the jack-hammer sounds show how much I remind her of him. The brutal deaths occurring in the begin, as the machine circles my body Strength and sorrow, or in her words, United States due to racism, and on in three cacophonous zaps. It’s more “haunting.” my hometown turf, are nothing but the like ZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP. On the day of the Grand Jury verdict same in, same out. No surprises. Then it’s all done. “Enjoy your day.” regarding the murder of Michael How any of this is happening, cancer, One fake boob is half deflated for Brown, in my home state of Missouri, shooting, choking – young death – this daily ritual. The other is swell- where my father practiced law and pro in the 21st Century, well, that’s the ing with radioactivity, like it’s going to bono supported civil rights cases, I sat mystery to me. cp burst when I lie down to rest. 15 more, in the radiation therapy waiting room, I say. amongst the coffee and pastries of three A friend told me that cancer treat- women who had finished their treat- ment was described to him as running ment. CNN was on. Missouri Governor two marathons, and radiation was the Jay Nixon was bull-shitting. I was equivalent of daily wind sprints after crooning my neck to listen to what was that. I’m no Iron Woman, but what happening at home. he says feels correct. I want diversions In the waiting room, I was offered 9 long thought, the East Europeans gave a perfect example. The Decay of American And our mainstream media, where these programs appear, have entered their East European phase. The Czechs did not Media use the term “fake news,” surely. But for them it would have been a misnomer, upside down, as it is for television-viewing Toward a Poor Journalism Americans in the early 21st century. The fake news is what is satirized, the satire is the real. It is treacherous to posit the golden age of anything, By Patrick L. Smith and especially so if the topic is the American press. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the hagiographer of “great Americans,” recently assigned the label to the Progressive Era, and Bill One evening a half-dozen years ago, I stayed at the house of Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, Albert Maysles, the noted documentary filmmaker, in upper called Kearns’s book “a pretty grand story” in his review of Manhattan. I had just flown in from Hong Kong, where I was it. It is that—a story—but it does not hold up otherwise. The living at the time. This was my first trip back to the States in noted muckrakers of the time—Steffens, Tarbell, Sinclair some years. Lewis—wrote an alternative truth in opposition. There was Something strange—strange to me—happened over nothing otherwise golden going on. Mainstream journalism dinner. We had not quite finished when someone looked at was Hearst and Pulitzer, who fear-mongered among white the kitchen clock and exclaimed, “The Colbert Report is on Americans with the “yellow peril” theme and got war fever in three minutes!” In half that time the table was empty and going as Roosevelt made up reasons to start the Spanish- we all had seats around the television set. No one—no one American War. This was the story, not the sidebar, and good other than I—seemed to think this abrupt migration needed enough to begin a critique of the press as we have it with explaining. mention of this period. Relations between the media and I had never before seen a show such as Stephen Colbert’s. power have rarely been healthy since. I knew nothing of the commonly understood genealogy: Even without some golden age as reference, American Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show begat The Colbert Report, even media are well on in a critical period of decay—critical to any as it has more recently begotten John Oliver’s Last Week paying-attention practitioner and also to what little remains Tonight. “Fake news” is now a broadcasting genre. I confess of American democracy. Readers of this magazine will not I still do not watch these programs much. But I go back to find the thought that mainstream media are unreliable at all that evening, when the phenomenon came at me all at once. surprising. But the betrayal of ordinary readers and viewers “First thought best thought,” Ginsberg used to say. And my has reached an extreme—so generating a deserved mistrust first thought about this new kind of humor—comedians cast that is probably without precedent. A startling proportion of as news presenters—disturbs me as much now as it did then. people are at least faintly aware that they are being misled, Fake news shows are a particular kind of satire. They are incessantly treated to lies as to events, causality, responsibil- political, plainly, but this did not strike me, and does not now, ity, and motive. There is as much or more misinformation as their salient feature. They are first of all media satire. They and disinformation as at the height of the Cold War decades. are about an official version of the truth, and the media’s par- There is very much more of what I call “the power of ticipation in the production and dissemination of this untrue leaving out,” the untruth of omission. This one finds in every truth. They are finally about what we, consumers and users edition of every major newspaper, on every wire service, and of information, know to be the true truth—or at least a truer in every broadcast news report. It is especially prevalent in truth—and the distance between this truth and the official coverage of foreign affairs. Washington’s authorization of version. As a friend explained that evening in a truth-telling last year’s coup in Egypt has had one mention in the main- filmmaker’s living room, “It’s humor, but it’s where we get ‘the stream American press, and this appears to have been a slip news.’ It’s funny because it’s so far from what the media tell us. of the tongue, never repeated. The Obama administration That’s ‘the joke.’” backed a coup in Kiev and now backs a government that is “You’ll get used to it,” someone else added. the first anywhere since 1945 to equip and field Nazi militias. I never have. As I went upstairs that night, that first thought Mention of these too-large-to-evade facts are so few and so was, “This is what the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians did attenuated that reality is deprived of any reality. This is the during the later Soviet period.” All was text and subtext: This power of leaving out. was their joke. Authentic communication was openly secret, The extreme just noted is alarming and has come upon us buried within the orthodoxy. Satire was more than a comic over the past dozen years. Since 2001 American media have device: It was a mask one wore to preserve some shred of au- committed themselves to totalizing what now amounts to a thenticity in public space. If all culture is subculture, as I have parallel reality. Ukraine, wherein this extreme has worsened

10 measurably, is a textbook example. The coup earlier this year recovered. and the war that followed had little to do with democratic Now to the second decisive moment. principles and everything to do with (1) wresting Crimea’s Last summer, after she was fired as Bill Keller’s successor Black Sea naval installations from Moscow’s control and (2) at the Times, Jill Abramson gave a speech at the Chautauqua gaining access to natural gas resources for Chevron and other Institution, an old convocation of well-intended self-improv- energy corporations. These realities are documented; I have ers in upstate New York. In it, Abramson described and then seen not a single mention of either in mainstream American explained the media’s response to the September 11th attacks media. in New York and Washington. She was the Times’ Washington We have seen this elsewhere and read our Orwell and must bureau chief when, immediately afterward, Ari Fleischer, put aside what versions of “it can’t happen here” may linger the White House press secretary, convened every influential within us. This is a capitulation to a pernicious assignment: to editor in the capital on a conference call. This was the defin- transform the national discourse into spectacle. Thinking in ing encounter, as Abramson described it: terms of public space, we now live in a strategic hamlet. “We The purpose of his call was to make an agreement with are destroying the village to save it” was the thought behind the press—this was just days after 9/11—that we not the Pentagon’s Vietnam-era euphemism. We can borrow it in publish any stories that would go into details about that our media have all but destroyed our public space in the the sources and methods of our intelligence programs. name of preserving it. I would defend these assertions against I have to say, that in the wake of 9/11, all of us readily any charge of exaggeration. agreed to that. * * * A minute or so later on the podium, Abramson reflected thus: There are things to do in response to this new circum- It wasn’t complicated to withhold such information. stance. But before proceeding to them it is best to understand And for some years, really quite a few years, I don’t the pathology that has led the press and its users into this think the press, in general, did publish any stories that moment of crisis. upset the Bush White House or seemed to breach that Since 1945, after which American primacy reached its high agreement. point, the nation’s media have had two moments when they faced the same fundamental choice. These came in 1947, when the Truman administration started the Cold War by backing Elsewhere in her presentation, Abramson offered a per- the Greek monarchy against a democratic insurgency, and in sonal view that stands as the clearest example I have ever 2001, when the second Bush administration declared its “war heard or read of the error I described above: “Journalists on terror.” In each case the media were forced into a choice are Americans, too,” she said in defense of all the withheld they never should have accepted or made. This was between stories and all the leaving out that flowed from the pact with their professional standards and ethics, however well or badly Fleischer. “I consider myself...to be a patriot.” they lived by them, and patriotic loyalty. In each case they The second moment of decision was a straight-ahead made the mistake of choosing, and twice they chose wrongly. reprise of the first, which is what you get when you refuse to The Cold War decades were without question the single look at the past and learn from it, and the years since speak most shameful passage in the modern history of the for themselves. In each case, there was a question of identity: American press. This is why so little is ever said today about What is the media’s relationship to power? Is it, in the old what newspapers and broadcasters did during this time. The spirit of “the Fourth Estate,” a freestanding pole of power, or is record is clear and perfectly available. But one finds no desire it an adjunct of political and military power and the power of to examine it with the intent of learning from error. I have prevailing ideology? In our context, consider simply the con- often argued in our post-2001 context that the best way for sequences had the American press resisted (as others outside a journalist to be a good American is to be a good journal- America did) Bush’s definition of the war on terror as war. A ist. With exceptions, this thought was absent from the 1950s critical distance would have been restored, and it is very pos- through the 1980s. Fear ruled, not less in the press than in sible we would now have a government less violent and reck- film and elsewhere. One was a patriot first, only then a pro- less abroad and less intrusive everywhere. fessional. In effect, a journalist following this dictum was As it has happened, the mainstream press now fails its neither, of course. The Watergate period was one exception, public incessantly. There is a straight line with many markers but the power the press exercised, and the independence it between its indefensible coverage of the WMD fabrications displayed, led quickly to a reconsolidation of power over it preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the lapses in coverage of once Reagan assumed the presidency. American media had a the NSA, coverage of the coups in Egypt and Ukraine, of Syria very bad Cold War, in short, and in my view they have never and across the Middle East and elsewhere. As this list sug- 11 “Our media have all but destroyed our public space in the name of preserving it ”. gests, the betrayals of principle and responsibility are worst readers all available perspectives, so enabling them to judge in cases of events abroad and national security. To me, this independently of interests. Between Dewey and Lippmann, reflects our historical moment: In America’s late-imperial roughly speaking, lay the difference between popular and elite phase, the preservation of power and primacy now becomes democracy, Jefferson and Hamilton. an ever more desperate project. Given the identity they have There is a large irony here. Lippmann, like many a disil- chosen for themselves at critical moments, the media must lusioned socialist after him, advertised himself as a demo- make their commitment to official text total—so creating the cratic realist. But his faith in the integrity and disinterest of elaborate subtext, a vast unsayable next to the sayable. This a trained elite was hopelessly idealistic. Dewey was an ideal- is a distinction most of us know and make even if we are not ist, but his argument that the press should be embedded in its consciously aware of it. community and stand at a distance from political and corpo- rate power was and remains unassailably realistic. Implicitly, * * * Lippmann posited a passive citizenry, Dewey one of activists. Many commentators have weighed in on Lippmann-Dewey In her post-Times pose as media critic, Abramson speaks over the decades. Among the better of them is E.J. Dionne, often of “our mandate to keep all of you informed,” as she put the Washington Post columnist, who took up the topic in his it in the Chautauqua lecture. The phrase is only apparently 1996 book on progressive Democrats, They Only Look Dead: innocuous. In it we find the original sin that now leads media “Journalism ought to be where facts, convictions, and argu- on their course of self-destruction. To understand this we ment meet...The press, by seeing its role as informing the have to go back to the 1920s and two of the period’s promi- public, abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the con- nent thinkers, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. versation of our culture.” Dewey, the noted social reformer, and Lippmann, the jour- This abandonment is now more or less complete. We live nalist and public intellectual, were concerned with the same amid the inevitable outcome of the two moments of de- new question. America was busy industrializing, urbanizing, cision described earlier, when media sealed their fate as and corporatizing. Power in the post-World War I era was Lippmannites. Standing at the far end of the second of these suddenly more complex and opaque. What is the fate, then, of decisive moments, it is easy to see where it has led the pro- the citizen in a mass democracy? How could people keep up fession. The stance of the journalist in the face of power with all that occurred around them? And what, therefore, was must by definition be adversarial. For any reporter or editor the proper function of the press? who assumes the Lippmannite position, the job description What comes down to us as the Lippmann-Dewey debate is changes from journalist to clerk. And this is what American well-known among journalism professors and a few thought- journalists, by and large, have made of themselves: With ful journalists. Oddly, the two never debated: They simply notable exceptions, they manage the bulletin boards of published different positions on these questions. Lippmann, the political, policy-making, defense, and security cliques high priest in the American cult of the expert, had little faith wherein American power now resides. in a democratic citizenry. Political affairs and policy were to be the preserve of a sequestered elite. Journalists were to * * * be part of this elite, their task being to convey information downward from the mount—“to keep all of you informed,” in It is impossible to look upon this impasse and leave it Abramson’s phrase. She and almost all her mainstream col- without response. Who will carry on the conversation of our leagues are Lippmannites, in a word. culture? As anyone who travels outside America knows, our Dewey was with Lippmann in more respects than is com- press has left many Americans strikingly ignorant relative to monly understood. Neither thought the average citizen able others as to the world around us and our nation’s place in it. to grasp current events beyond those of very immediate inter- This is perilous. How to replace this ignorance with knowl- est. But he was suspicious of any notion that the press was to edge and understanding? act as the tribune-like bearer of news from the cloistered uni- My answers begin with this: The place of alternative media verse of experts outward to the less capable masses. Dewey, of such as CounterPunch has already begun to change funda- a communitarian bent, saw the press as public space wherein mentally. Among mainstream media we see a hollowing out took place an infinitely sided exchange. Its job was to give in which no future is apparent: They retain influence as they

12 surrender credibility. All mainstream journalism, on and off from their audiences but, more poignantly, from their own the battlefield, effectively becomes “embedded journalism.” thoughts, emotions, and bodies. A play, in short, was mere This process will continue, influence ever dwindling. And spectacle. This Grotowski called “rich theater.” it places a new weight of responsibility on so-called alterna- Poor theater arose from the simple question, What is tive media. I have never cared for this term, and now, ever theater? When all not essential is taken away, what remains? more plainly, these media provide not “alternative” narrative Grotowski’s answers were two. When rich theater’s furnish- and interpretation but authentic versions of the same. They ings were removed, including the proscenium, it transformed publish and broadcast less “against” media more power- the performer-audience relationship: They entered into ful than they but “for” perfectly ordinary, discernible truths. the rawest kind of direct contact possible. Two, there was They are the antidote to ignorance. performance, the actors. In his Polish Theater Laboratory, There is also the responsibility all of us bear, but journal- Grotowski trained them for years—in movement and muscle ists in particular, to history. Mainstream journalists do not control, psychological and emotional training—to equip often produce history’s first draft, as the old adage goes, them to connect, above all and as honestly as possible, with however much they may or may not have done so in the past. themselves—and only then with an audience. This was poor Journalism in our time and by the evidence in many others, theater, the object being “to cross our frontiers, exceed our is the first draft of the accounting of things power intends to limitations, fill our emptiness.” (Anyone who saw Beck and deploy to keep truth out of the history books. It is important Malina’s Living Theater at this time, or Joe Chaikin’s Open now for journalists outside the mainstream to recognize the Theater, has an idea of what Grotowski meant.) burden this places upon them. They are the historian’s true We borrow and bend Grotowski’s question, then. What is friends and bear the duty the historian imposes. Plainly and journalism before it is anything else? A few dozen journalism simply, this means forcing the great unsayable into what is graduates scattered around the world will know my answer: said. It is to push the naked emperor squarely into the con- It is seeing and saying, at bottom nothing more. Scrape away versation. And this is done whenever journalists speak the the superfluous and the conventions and you have report- unspoken language. This is the task of those truly responsible ing, observation, and writing or speaking or filming. All the among them. rest is eligible for removal, and the craft’s accreted encum- brances are simply too numerous to name. Many derive from * * * unhealthy relationships with power—political power, corpo- rate power, financial power (via the stock market listings of It will be evident by now that I advocate a top-to-bottom media companies), bureaucratic power, the power of edito- renovation. By this I mean an act of restoration accomplished rial hierarchies, the power of embedded ethical corruptions. over a period of time, a recovery of journalism as an autono- All these must be scrubbed clean. The journalist as seer and mous institution. How and where this is done is an inside- sayer discards almost all of the intricate conventions familiar outside question. In the “where” box, the job might get done to anyone practicing the craft. There is no beholden-ness to within established media, but this is far from certain and a come between the journalist and the work. generational project even in the best outcome. And alterna- Among the too-numerous-to-list problems, three are egre- tive media are again essential in any case: Only in their pres- gious. One is the corrupting of accuracy and honesty in ex- ence will mainstream organs accept any obligation to evolve. change for access. No journalist alive does not know the un- As to the “how”—what exactly re-imagined media might written rules of “the access game.” All offers to bargain on the look like—there are countless answers. We already have point should be withdrawn. Two is the self-censorship trans- numerous examples of the process in motion, but there is mitted throughout the system. This has been prevalent and a lot of territory still unexplored. My own thinking draws customary for so long as to be more pernicious than the overt from an unlikely source. Some readers will remember Jerzy variety. Once journalism reclaims its proper place, this can Grotowski, the Polish theater director and theorist prominent recede and disappear. in the late 1960s. His most influential book, published in 1968, Three concerns language. To assume the language of insti- was called Towards a Poor Theater, and I name my thesis in tutions and the language of sources and those covered—ci- tribute: I urge journalists to work toward a poor journalism. vilian casualties are “collateral damage,” flesh-and-blood sol- Grotowski’s project rested on a radical stripping away. diers are “boots on the ground,” the coup in Egypt last year Theater by his time was encrusted with convention, artifice, was “the restoration of democracy,” and so on infinitely—is to and “plastic elements”—elaborate costume and makeup, work in false language. It is to make the journalist a collabo- lighting, sets, and so on. Lots of distracting junk at the rator. It is the single most effective device forcing journalists expense of purity, in short. With naturalism the principle, the into the state of alienation from self that is common among proscenium had become a prison, confining actors and audi- them. The language of obscurantist bureaucrats is required ences alike. Performers wore “life masks,” alienated not just at one or another organ according to its proximity to power,

13 the Times being Exhibit A. Orwell described the way false ed in the elite they aspire to join and defend. Whatever they language devastates our ability to think clearly—precisely its may have been as they came up in the craft, too much money purpose—in “Politics and the English Language,” published and aggrandizement has ruined them. Their work is purely in the spring of 1946, and the problem as we have it is seven clerical. decades’ worth of worse. In a single word, journalists must become and remain I describe a cleansing process only in brief, but its point unincorporated, and this I mean in all senses of the term. should be plain. Rich journalism creates distance between “Disenfranchised” will also do. The unique place they occupy, readers and journalists and—miss this not—between jour- in society but not altogether of it, must be observed— nalists wearing the “life-masks” of the profession and them- honored, even. This requires mechanisms allowing them a selves—what they truly know and think and think should significant distance from power so that they can remain faith- be said. These distances—journalist from reader, journalist ful to their own consciousness of themselves and their ethics. from himself or herself—are now fixed in the culture of the Money does not serve this purpose; modest living does. And craft. Fake news programs, returning to our starting point, power here includes the power of media owners. In my view, are satires of an alienation that cannot be mentioned. Poor a system of tenure would be one mechanism addressing these journalism is intended to erase these distances and this alien- specific problems. The journalist would have the economic ation—to discard the proscenium, we can say, and make the security he or she deserves and distance—as in protection— journalist whole, integrated, not a stranger to himself—filling from the people writing the checks. our emptiness, in Grotowski’s phrase. To some this may come over bitterly. My responses are two. This may come across as an angelic idea of what can be First, I was in the mainstream media for decades and know done to remedy a dysfunction in our media culture now not the power of the poisonous paycheck, as I call it, only too short of dangerous. I usually quote Bergson in response to well. Second, I mention what I was told long years ago at one these kinds of charges: “It is no use maintaining that any leap of the New York tabloids (with pride on the part of the teller): forward does not imply a creative effort. That would be to Back then the Bureau of Labor Statistics classified journalists forget that most great reforms appeared at first impracticable, as blue-collar workers. And this is just where we should be as in fact they were.” Any journalist who may read this essay if we are ever to be free enough to do unsullied work. It is can think of it this way: To the extent this project seems im- the precondition of authentic disinterest and immunity from practical is precisely the extent it needs to get done. intimidation. The adversarial position in the face of power, mentioned earlier, requires this—a kind of disinvestment. Let * * * all aspiration and imagination soar, I argue, but the work and clean hands are the rewards, not places at high table, where One other aspect of this renovation project—of the many I the food is processed anyway. cp cannot cover here—must be mentioned briefly. To introduce it, this: Patrick L. Smith is the author of Time No Longer: Americans A dozen or so years ago the Overseas Press Club, a long After the American Century. He was the International Herald moribund and lately revived institution in New York, gave Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 one of its annual prizes to Amy Goodman, noted host of to 1992. Democracy Now! Tom “Greatest Generation” Brokaw was the master of ceremonies at the awards dinner, attended by several hundred correspondents and editors. Goodman took the podium, refused the prize, and began to explain why in the admirably direct manner she is known for. Brokaw in- The Brain Game stantly intervened to force her away from the microphone: “No, no, no…, We don’t accept this kind of…, You can’t…,” The NFL Faces Third and Long and so on. Not until numerous of us shouted him down was Goodman able to finish. By DAVID MACARAY A disgraceful display by any measure, and here is the point of the tale: Journalists have to get poor in the ordinary meaning of this term if the profession is to reclaim its in- In its ability to diagnose and treat injuries, the extent to tegrity. I do not refer to reporters and editors paid ordinary which sports medicine has improved over the course of, say, salaries for (the best of them) honorable work that would be the last forty years is remarkable. It wasn’t that long ago when more honorable were the craft cleaner. I refer to the upper the only choice the team physician had to treat a star athlete’s ranks—the Brokaws, Bill Kellers, and so on. As Brokaw’s out- leg pain was to take x-rays (to make sure there was no frac- burst made perfectly clear, these people are vastly too invest- ture), prescribe anti-inflammatories, apply liniment, and have 14 him soak it in the whirlpool. that NFL commissioner is a well-paying gig. According to Compare those limitations with today’s advances. Bloomberg Businessweek, the commish made $74 million Microscopic muscle tears, ever so slightly inflamed tendons, over the past two years. and minor ligament damage can now be scoped out on a Not to nitpick, but here are four things Roger Goodell can near-molecular level. In fact, it’s been argued that the reason rightly be criticized for: His attempt to lowball NFL refer- today’s athletes seem to suffer more injuries than in years past ees, only to have the League embarrassed by the startling in- is purely the result of technological advances. CT scans and competence of their replacements; his unwillingness to insist MRIs can now reveal injuries or defects that were heretofore that the Washington Redskins change their nickname from “undiagnosable.” a reference to aboriginal skin pigmentation to something Baseball people tell this joke: Question: How did they less anachronistic; his gutless response to players accused of say “Tommy John surgery” in the 1960s? Answer: “My arm spousal abuse (obviously, boys will be boys, and his bosses hurts.” Former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda likes to don’t want their star players suspended); and his suggest- recount how, when he played baseball in the 1950s, the team ing with a straight face that the NFL will soon have teams in had only one trainer, and all he did was walk around with a Europe. bottle of rubbing alcohol...most of which he’d already drunk As for playing football in Europe, this was no trivial thing. by the seventh inning. Goodell wasn’t simply announcing that the League would As for professional football, there have been scores of be increasing the number of exhibition games played across promising careers cut short by catastrophic injuries which, the pond; he was boasting that the NFL would, in fact, be today, could be mended with surgical procedures that have establishing franchises in places like London and Barcelona, become more or less routine. A name that typically comes which, as the players’ union has pointed out, would be a logis- up in those conversations is that of Gale Sayers (“The Kansas tical nightmare. Comet”), the gifted but injury-plagued running back of the Where would the players and families live? Where would Chicago Bears. the kids go to school? What’s the currency? What language Another startling difference between then and now is the is spoken? Would they practice in Spain? Would they fly comparative awareness of head injuries. Previously, when a to Phoenix for a game, fly back to Spain for team meetings wide receiver wobbled unsteadily off the field after being clob- and more practice, and then fly to Dallas for another game, bered, the broadcaster would chuckle and describe him as then back to Spain, all in the same week? Players don’t like “having had his bell rung.” No one mentioned concussions. being traded from one coast to the other, much less being told In fact, if the play-by-play guys had publicly cautioned the they’ve been traded to another continent. team to check for something called a “brain concussion,” they Also, it’s jingoistic and conceited of Goodell and the owners likely would have been considered alarmists or busy-bodies. to assume that the world is waiting with bated breath to be in- There are plenty of reasons to be critical of the National troduced to American-style football. These countries already Football League’s commissioner, Roger Stokoe Goodell, a have their own games, thank you very much. They have their lifelong sports aficionado and privileged son of former U.S. own sports cultures, their own sports heroes, their own ath- Senator Charles Goodell (R-NY). Clearly, he has shown letic traditions. himself to be more a follower than a leader. Because he serves Just because Coca-Cola happens to sell very well in Europe, at the pleasure of the League’s owners, Goodell has developed and there are close to 70 Wal-Mart stores in China, doesn’t an impressive array of bureaucratic survival skills, which is to mean the whole world is lining up to copy us. Believing they say, he realizes you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. can set up NFL teams in European cities (like Starbucks fran- Given America’s adoration of sports in general and football chises) is just one more example of American arrogance and in particular (pro football is our most popular sport, made to the entrepreneurial impulse gone awry. order for the medium of television), the NFL commissioner is Speaking of which, if a meaningful international presence a coveted and prestigious position—more desirable even than is what American professional sports is truly seeking, then it being CEO of Universal Studios or the Exxon Corporation. missed a golden opportunity back in the 1970s when base- Indeed, former Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, an ardent ball chose not to place a major league team in Mexico City. It football fan who was briefly engaged to ex-Denver Bronco would have been a perfect fit. Not only is the game extremely wide receiver Rick Upchurch, has admitted that it’s a job she popular in Mexico, but today’s major league rosters are filled herself would love to have someday. with Latin American ballplayers. And how cool would it be to have Ms. Rice as commission- One of the prime arguments against placing a team in er? Cool and appropriate. The deceitful, propaganda-spew- Mexico City was that it would be too far for the Eastern teams ing, war-mongering Margaret Thatcher-wannabe who helped to travel. Really? Mexico is too far away? If major league lay waste to Iraq, placed in charge of America’s most brutal, baseball honestly believed long-distance travel was a deal entertaining and profitable game. Perfect. Also, let it be said breaker, why did they put a team in Montreal (a hockey town, 15 for crying out loud), in 1969, and force the Dodgers, Padres, really apply to brain concussions or knee injuries, not if the and Giants to fly there? goal is to avoid tough decisions and, instead, pin the rap on Back to Goodell. As slick as the commissioner is, the one somebody. Even though everyone from President Obama thing he can’t be criticized for is the brain concussion epidem- to the U.S. Congress to Jesse Jackson to MSNBC is now dis- ic affecting current and former NFL players. This problem cussing the issue of concussions with the appropriate gravitas, was something he inherited, not something he created or those discussions aren’t likely to reveal any smoking gun. allowed to happen. Professional football players (the NFL Although it’s true that profit-minded owners have always was established in 1920, the same year the ACLU was founded been callously aware that those potentially injurious tackles and women were given the right to vote) have been suffer- and made-for-instant-replay collisions are extremely popular ing catastrophic injuries, including brain damage, all the way with fans and media (for tax purposes, owners are allowed to back to before the days of Bronko Nagurski. “depreciate” their players, the same way factory owners can One might ask, what exactly is a “concussion”? Simply depreciate machinery), there’s no denying a fundamental fact: put, it is defined as a minor or major TBI (traumatic brain With or without the monetary component, football is an in- injury) that occurs when the brain bounces against the inside herently violent sport. of the skull. It should be noted that a direct blow to the head Indeed, going all the way back to before helmets of any is not required to cause one; a player can sustain a concus- sort—even those tiny leather ones that now appear ridicu- sion simply by having his central mass struck hard enough for lous—were made mandatory (the NCAA didn’t require his head to snap back and his brain to bounce off the skull’s helmets until 1939, and the NFL not until 1943), football has interior. always been a bloody gladiatorial spectacle, a glorified form While those violent helmet-to-helmet collisions we’ve all of controlled mayhem. It’s the nature of the game. seen on TV (repeatedly shown in titillating slo-mo) can obvi- And because, since time immemorial, rugged boys and ag- ously result in brain trauma, so can something as seemingly gressive young men have rejoiced in knocking the stuffing innocuous as a quarterback falling backwards and striking out of each other, when you offer large sums of money (or his head on the artificial turf. The thing to remember about college scholarships) to do exactly that, you’re going to have helmets—even those super-deluxe models manufactured by no shortage of volunteers, even with the specter of serious the Riddell Corporation—is that they were invented spe- injury looming in the background. Tell an athletically gifted cifically to prevent skull fractures, and in that regard they’ve high school or college kid that he has three chances in ten of been spectacularly successful. being seriously injured, he might consider those odds to be Something else to remember: While the concussive force quite favorable. with which players are being hammered increased exponen- As the man said, pro football and brain concussions go to- tially with the arrival of Dick Butkus, Ronnie Lott, Ray Lewis gether like vodka and regrets. Which is precisely why some and company, players have been getting their brains scram- pundits have reached the radical conclusion that the only bled for well over a century. And as much as we’d like to lay viable “solution” to the concussion problem is to ban the the problem at someone’s feet, that phenomenon can’t be sport entirely. That or go from tackle football to flag football. blamed on Commissioner Goodell or his predecessors, Paul Don’t laugh; that suggestion has been made in earnest. Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle. It will surprise many to learn that, around the turn of the And let’s not forget that, even though the gesture was as 20th century, banning the game of football was not out of transparent as cellophane and was made out of a combined the question. In 1905, the public outcry over the stunning sense of panic, self-defense and fear of future liability, it was brutality of the sport had reached the point where President Goodell and his NFL masters who finally sought to “address” Theodore Roosevelt himself felt it necessary to intervene. the issue by agreeing to pony up $765 million to settle the Accordingly, he summoned the football coaches and staff of lawsuit filed by more than 4,500 former players. Even by Harvard, Yale and Princeton University, and challenged them today’s inflated standards, $765 million is a sizeable amount. to come up with ways of making the game safer. Unfortunately, because recent studies predict that as many How brutal was football, circa 1905? It was brutal enough as 30 percent of NFL players will suffer brain injuries (and an to have become a national scandal. Incredibly, in that year even higher percentage will suffer knee injuries), as generous alone, 18 high school and college players died from injuries. as that $765 million settlement appears to be, it probably isn’t The Washington Post reported that from 1900 to 1905, inclu- anywhere close to sufficient. Just consider the estimates of sive, at least 45 football players had died from injuries sus- treating the physical and psychological ailments of military tained during games. The following is taken from the Post, personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and compare October 15, 1905: them to the real numbers. The costs of treatments are already “Nearly every death may be traced to ‘unnecessary rough- many times greater than predicted. ness.’ Picked up unconscious from beneath a mass of other The truth of the matter is that the “blame game” doesn’t players, it was generally found that the victim had been

16 kicked in the head or stomach, so as to cause internal injuries programs entirely. Others changed from football to the less or concussion of the brain, which, sooner or later, ended life.” brutal game of rugby. For many college campuses, tackle The fact that 18 young men died in a single year is stag- football was now deemed “too dangerous.” gering enough; that it occurred in high school and college So what, if anything, does all this mean for today’s NFL— football games, and not at the professional level, where the particularly after it has already settled the lawsuit? Yes, foot- hardest hitters play the game for money, makes it almost un- ball is wildly popular, and yes, it’s hugely profitable, and yes, fathomable. Yet, the death count was so alarming, a lurid you have to be tough to play it, and yes, brain concussions are cartoon appeared in the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune endemic to the game, and yes, something needs to be done. showing the Grim Reaper straddling a goal post. But what? What specifically can the NFL do to curtail these According to reports, it was the death of one player in injuries? When one considers all the possible ramifications,

Brain scan of trauma sustained by former NFL linebacker Junior Seau particular, Harold Moore, a popular running back at Union it’s more than just a knotty problem; it’s an existential crisis College, that precipitated Roosevelt’s call for action. In a capable of threatening the future of the game. game against NYU, Moore died of a cerebral hemorrhage Understandably, the League is currently exploring the least after being kicked in the head. Take a moment to consider painful and least disruptive solutions. Alas, one of those hy- these numbers. What would the public’s response be today pothetical solutions sounds suspiciously close to a “non-solu- if 18 NFL players died from injuries during the same season? tion.” It’s been suggested that the NFL effectively “corral” the What came out of those Roosevelt-led meetings were some problem by setting up a permanent two or three billion dollar fairly significant rule changes. For one, the forward pass was endowment to treat players—past and present—who have or now made legal. This was done in the hope that defenses will have suffered brain injuries. would be forced to spread out a bit instead of being concen- In the view of some hardliners and purists, the NFL should trated along the line of scrimmage, waiting to “pile-drive” do two things: It should behave generously and magnani- the ball carrier. For another, a player was ruled “down” (and mously toward players with serious injuries, but it should the action stopped) when he fell to the ground. Apparently, remain coldly fatalistic in regard to the game itself. It should before this rule, the defense could continue to assault the ball- accept the fact that, just as bullfighters get gored, and race car carrier as he lay on the field. drivers get killed doing what they do, football players (even In the wake of all the negative publicity, several colleges— high school kids) are going to have their share of brain con- including Duke, Columbia and Northwestern University— cussions. decided to throw in the towel and suspend their football Rather than going overboard in trying to prevent concus-

17 sions, the NFL should set up a “treatment” fund and, simul- helmets of yesteryear, a move that would prevent players taneously, consider taking steps to deflect future liability by from harboring a false sense of security. To wit, it would stop requiring players to sign disclaimers or waivers, absolving the them from using their helmets as battering rams or spears. owners of any “blame” for subsequent head injuries. Take the After all, who’s going to want to plow head-first into someone position that, just as people know the risks of smoking ciga- when all he’s wearing for protection is something resembling rettes (yet millions still smoke), boys and men who willingly a leather shower cap? play the game of football know the risks of concussions. Do It has already been noted that some people (believing that that and be done with it. desperate times call for desperate measures) have called for But if those estimates are anywhere close to correct, and the NFL to adopt a “no contact” version of the game. Moving 30 percent of NFL players are expected to suffer brain inju- screens and shoving would still be allowed, but blocking and ries, this becomes a whole other deal. With or without signed tackling would not. waivers, people have argued that those numbers are simply This “enlightened,” no-contact version of the game would too disturbing to ignore. Not only would we not tolerate retain all the brainy strategy and deceptive tactics of old- a 30 percent injury rate in any other “dangerous” profes- fashioned tackle football—as well as all its speed and virtu- sion (loggers, coal miners, commercial fishermen, etc.), we oso athleticism—but no one (or a miniscule number) would wouldn’t allow it in our household pets. suffer broken bones or concussions. It’s true. Does anyone honestly believe we would allow On a purely intellectual level, this argument makes sense. 30 percent of our pet cats and dogs to be seriously injured? Considering the gargantuan size and tremendous horsepower Clearly, this concussion issue has reached crisis proportions. generated by today’s players, the only sure-fire way of insur- There have already been several NFL suicides associated ing that the brain doesn’t get bounced around inside their with injury-related dementia, including Pro Bowl linebacker skulls is to remove violent physical contact from the equation. Junior Seau who, in 2012, tragically took his own life. You’d Again, it’s an established fact: If you absorb enough of those have to be blind, deaf and dumb and a presidential candidate punishing hits during a career, the cumulative effect can be not to realize the concussion problem needs to be fixed. devastating. Yet, when it comes to the actual “fixing,” there are few Still, one doesn’t have to be a cynic to take the view that options. In fact, there seem to be only two: improved rules even with all the controversy surrounding concussions, and improved equipment. To the League’s credit, some rules nothing substantive, much less radical or revolutionary, is have already been changed. They’ve adopted a universal con- going to change in professional football. Some players will cussion protocol; helmet-to-helmet hits aren’t allowed; rolling continue to have reservations, indignant pundits will contin- blocks aimed at the knees are illegal; players aren’t allowed to ue to seize the moral high ground, the media will continue unload on “defenseless” receivers; and “unnecessary rough- to pay lip service, and large sums of money will continue ness” of the quarterback is being called more often (purists to change hands, but little of any consequence will actually argue that it’s being called too often). change. As for improved equipment, don’t hold your breath. To embrace that view, all one need do is consider a com- There’s only so much you can do with padding and acrylics. peting sport where concussions, hemorrhages, fractured jaws, That said, demonstrating their willingness to leave no stone and broken eye orbits are the desired goal and not merely an unturned, it’s been reported that helmet manufacturers have unfortunate by-product. Of course, we’re speaking of profes- conducted research on the internal skulls of woodpeckers in sional boxing. Even if we go back only as far as the early 20th an attempt to learn how these unique creatures can spend century, the record will show that there have been hundreds their lives banging their noggins against trees without suffer- of prize-fighters killed in the ring, beaten to death by their ing headaches or injury. opponents. Unsettling as it is to visualize scientists decapitating these So despite all the hand-wringing, let’s not pretend that a helpless birds and peering inside their tiny heads, it also comprehensive “institutional approach” to reducing football raises a philosophical question: Who can say with certainty brain injuries is waiting in the wings, because it isn’t. And the that woodpeckers don’t suffer headaches? Obviously, no one reason it isn’t is because there is no simple remedy available. knows what these birds “feel.” For woodpeckers, the compul- But fortuitously for the NFL, until the infinitely more violent sion to drill holes in trees is an instinct, something they were sport of professional boxing (or mixed martial arts for that born to do (with or without the pain), just as it can be argued matter) is outlawed, the League has been provided with a con- that it’s an “instinct” for red-blooded male homo sapiens to venient buffer, one that shelters it from anything too drastic want to knock the crap out of each other, without having to or deleterious being called for. be formally “taught” to do so. Which, in part, is why—despite the frenzy of negative pub- Back to equipment: Outlandish as it seems, it’s even licity—the NFL welcomes the on-going debate about how to been suggested that the NFL go back to those flimsy leather deal with players accused of spousal abuse. That’s because 18 the continued discussion of a topic as socially repugnant as Philippines, Vietnam, Burma, and a number of other Asian spousal abuse effectively moves the conversation away from states, the PRC has sought respite by “pivoting” into Central the messy topics of brain concussions and dementia. Asia. Players who have beaten their wives or girlfriends may In Central Asia, China can pursue its energy-slurping, present a public relations problem for the League, but it’s a exporting, and resource-acquisition ambitions beyond the problem that’s manageable—a problem that can be readily ad- oppressive shadow of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. U.S. forces are dressed, even if it results in harsher than preferred penalties, withdrawing from another Stan, Afghanistan, giving China including lifetime expulsions, being imposed on the game’s more room to expand its influence. star players. In an unhappy coincidence, the U.S. decided to play the big If banning perpetual wife-beaters for life is what it takes, man in Europe and wrest Ukraine out of the orbit of Russia. then so be it. Anything that simultaneously draws attention As a result Russia, which was supposed to play the Central away from brain concussions, and makes NFL ownership Asian role of suspicious counterweight to China has, instead, appear decisive and resolute, is going be welcomed. It’s fair to been thrust willy-nilly into the PRC’s arms. say that Condoleeza Rice herself would approve. cp But all is not beer and skittles for China in Central Asia, especially in Xinjiang. David Macaray is a playwright and the author of It’s Never China’s hold on the region now called Xinjiang has always Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor. been tenuous and provisional. Losing Xinjiang has been a harbinger of imperial decline, a history of which the masters of Zhongnanhai are undoubtedly well aware. But hanging on to Xinjiang is neither cheap nor easy. Its history over the last three hundred years is of autonomy The Stan That Never Was under weak governments and even brief flashes of indepen- dence. From 1865 to 1877 Yakub Beg ruled most of the region China and the Uyghurs as emir from Kashgar, today the main oasis city of south- By Peter Lee ern Xinjiang. In 1933, Kashgar was also the seat of a brief Ambrose Bierce famously said that “War is God’s way of “Republic of East Turkestan”. teaching Americans geography.” When the forces of the People’s Liberation Army moved God, with some on-planet help, is probably scheduling a into Xinjiang in the 1940s, the CCP adopted a slate of policies lesson on Central Asia. that have shown considerable continuity to this day. Central Asia is Stan-land, that is to say a group of nations As a matter of divide and rule, administrative borders are of largely Turkic-speaking peoples, many of which started out drawn to split the Uyghur population into a number of sepa- as Soviet Socialist Republics under the USSR, and then re- rate districts. Some of these districts are classified as “autono- ceived independence when the Soviet Union fell apart. mous” districts of other ethnic groups, even if they were not There’s Turkmenistan, Tajikstan, Kygyzstan, and in the majority, so that they would be administered by non- Uzbekistan. And there’s Kazakhstan, the big one. There’s Uyghur ethnic officials. oil and gas out there, and pipelines. Pepe Escobar coined The major Uyghur population centers and transporta- the term “Pipelineistan” to describe how economic, security, tion arteries are shadowed by military colonies, colloquially and political issues, for the great powers at least, all revolve known as Bingtuan, designed to be self-sustaining units that around the question of what pipelines would be allowed to engaged in economic pursuits while deterring and, as needed, deliver the region’s energy riches to which beneficiaries. suppressing Uyghur resistance. And there’s the Stan that never was, Uyghurstan, struggling In education, a program of Mandarin education attempts to emerge from beneath the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous to wean Uyghur youth away from their ethnic identity. Region”, which forms the northwest quartile of the People’s Religious practice is discouraged (non-religious comport- Republic of China. ment was encouraged in schools and used as a criterion for There are ten million Uyghurs in the “XUAR”, forming a advancement in the party and government). “stateless nation” i.e. a cohesive ethnic group with aspirations Particularly in the north, nomadism is discouraged and to independence, aspirations that have paradoxically been conversion to fixed animal husbandry encouraged, in order strengthened by Chinese efforts to simultaneously oppress, to integrate Uyghurs more solidly into the social and political co-opt, and assimilate them. matrix of the PRC system. To date, the PRC has enjoyed a relatively free hand in And immigration of Han (i.e. ethnic Chinese) settlers Xinjiang. is encouraged to dilute the Uyghur majority. This policy is As the United States has “pivoted” into the Western the most successful and the most resented. Uyghurs, once Pacific and cultivated the anti-PRC inclinations of Japan, the a dominant majority in Xinjiang, are down to 40% of the 19 “The Uyghurs of Xinjiang may end up with the worst of both worlds: at war and without a nation ”.

XUAR’s population today, about the same percentage as Han Thanks to Western pressure, Rebiya Khadeer—who was Chinese. Xinjiang exerts a classic frontierland attraction on known for a time as “the fourth richest person in China” but Han migrants from the interior, offering opportunity to less forfeited her wealth and privileged position as a delegate to educated and polished strivers who don’t mix well with the the National People’s Congress with her statements in support Uyghur nationality. In fact, they often don’t mix at all, with of Uyghur rights—was able to make it to the West, estab- Hans and Uyghurs often occupying separate residential dis- lish herself as the leader of the World Uyghur Congress and tricts and even using their own time zones (Beijing time for achieve a certain international prominence as the “Mother of Hans and local time for Uyghurs). the Uyghurs”. A relatively perfunctory “hearts and minds” outreach has Ilham Tothi, a scholar who became one of the richest usually served as a counterpoint to control policies, except Uyghurs in Beijing by consulting and transacting business when nationwide governance broke down during the Great as he taught at the Nationalities University, was stripped of Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and rule (or more his wealth and hounded back to Xinjiang. There, he taught accurately, near-anarchy and misrule) was a matter of wildly economics and tried to walk the tightrope between acceptable applied sticks and no carrots at all. advocacy and criminal dissent and failed, at least in the eyes In the 1990s, challenged by the collapse of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party. The PRC blocked his opportunity to and the emergence of the stans across the border, the CCP did go to the United States in 2010 for one year as a visiting fellow try something new with a program of political and econom- at Indiana University, and, in 2014, shocked the international ic liberalization. Hu Yaobang, the darling of China’s more community by arresting sentencing him to life imprisonment liberal reformers, embarked on a “united front” approach to for “separatism”—and stripping him of his remaining prop- encourage Xinjiang minorities enter the Communist Party erty. and occupy various posts from the localities on up. Sixty five years of Han occupation have not reconciled The experiment, from the CCP’s perspective, has been many Uyghurs to Han rule. Instead, in a display of dialectical judged a failure. Underqualified and undermotivated locals materialism that would perhaps have pleased Marx, if not the were slotted into party posts at the local level and were either CCP, the further exertion of PRC control over Xinjiang has co-opted (i.e. advanced interests of the locals at the expense directly contributed to a stronger sense of Uyghur identity, of the party) or were unable to work effectively with the grievance, and nationalism. PRC efforts to ingratiate itself higher ups. As a result, the Communist Party management with the people of Xinjiang by investment in infrastructure of Xinjiang is seen as a major headache; the locals can’t be and public services have served to strengthen a sense of unity trusted with the job, and qualified and talented Han cadres and ethnic integration across the region. Massive investment are not enthusiastic about serving in a difficult, sometimes in the strategically important but rather low-quality and ex- dangerous, and usually quite unprofitable hardship post. pensive Karamay oil field has simply fed resentment that the Economic liberalization in the 1990s did allow fortunes to Uyghur patrimony is getting siphoned off to China. be made among select Uyghur entrepreneurs. The details are This unhappiness has translated into unhappiness, resis- unknown to me, but enrichment in 1990s PRC often involved tance, unrest…and maybe more. preferential access to import and export permits and bank There have been several spectacular incidents of vio- credit, all highly valued and fungible commodities, and in lence involving Uyghurs, ranging from urban ethnic rioting Beijing there was a resentful perception in some quarters that between Uyghurs and Hans as occurred in Urumchi in 2013; Uyghurs were being given excessive preferences in pursuit of bloody village clashes that have claimed dozens and allegedly some political objectives. hundreds of lives on both sides, seemingly triggered by local If so, preferential policies and prosperity did not translate outrage at some government injustice, and usually involve into permanent loyalty or, for that matter, perception of any murderous hacking and chopping by the Uyghur side and identity of interests between Uyghur business leaders and the a lethal hail of gunfire by PRC security units; and the spec- C C P. tacular incident in Beijing—filmed by security cameras and It is perhaps noteworthy that two wealthy Uyghurs, Rebiya played at Ilham Tothi’s trial—in which an SUV driven by a Khadeer and Ilham Tothi, both became outspoken advocates group of Uyghurs and flying a jihadi flag barreled through the of Uyghur interests—and were stripped of their fortunes by crowd of tourists at Tiananmen Square, killing two and injur- the PRC. ing forty before crashing into security barriers and exploding

20 into flame. represented Uyghur violence for public relations purposes, The issue of Uyghur violence is an extremely fraught ques- while denying Western journalists the opportunity to inde- tion, even what to call it. Should the “T” word—“terrorism” pendently investigate and verify the regime’s claims. be invoked? After three days of Chinese indignation, Jan Psaki, the State The PRC promiscuously applies the term to most Uyghur- Department spokesperson, was prevailed upon to grudgingly related clashes. People outside the PRC who are concerned cough up this diplomatic hairball: with Uyghur affairs in Xinjiang—the Uyghur diaspora, “Based on the information reported by the Chinese media, human rights watchers, and academics—balk at accepting this appears to be an act of terrorism targeting random the “terror” framing and thereby seeming to give the PRC members of the public, so we are calling this an act of terror- further license to surveil, harass, detain, beat, imprison, and ism.” kill Uyghurs. In a nice compromise, the United States maintained its To the dismay of Uyghur supporters, after 9/11 the U.S. gov- principled skepticism and the moral high ground, at least in ernment yielded to Chinese importunities and designated the its view, and the PRC got to say the U.S. had agreed Kunming “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” as a terrorist organiza- was terrorism. tion. However, it is an open question as to whether this pro- Specialists in Uyghur affairs, for their part, strongly suspect paganda coup for China marked a significant upgrade in the that the Kunming outrage was a horrific one-off by a group PRC’s cooperation with the United States on Uyghur violence. of Uyghurs that had planned to exfiltrate the PRC for what- It is widely believed that ETIM doesn’t exist in any mean- ever reason, found their way blocked by PRC border guards ingful form, so it is possible that the U.S. decided it would and the willingness of neighboring states to engage in refoule- only acquiesce to a terror designation that would require no ment (the illegal and involuntary return of refugees to their meaningful action against Uyghurs outside of the PRC. nation of origin), and expressed their rage in the murderous This suspicion is also supported by the rather remarkable outbreak. fact that the famous Uyghurs of Guantanamo, who were at Resistance to characterizing violence in Xinjiang as ter- the heart of a political firestorm concerning their repatria- rorism remains strong. While discussing a subsequent high tion in 2009, had already been deemed eligible for release by profile outrage (the fatal hatcheting of the imam of Kashgar’s the Bush administration—not necessarily because they were Id Khan mosque, the largest mosque in Xinjiang and indeed all not militants (some of them admitted to training at the al all of the PRC, as retribution for the cleric’s collaboration with Qaeda camp at Bora Bora, albeit, it was insisted, at the most the authorities), the New York Times used the formulation rudimentary level), but because the U.S. had determined to its “a growing number of terrorist-style attacks” to describe the satisfaction that if they were militants their activities would various incidents that had bedeviled the XUAR. be directed only against the PRC and not against the interests Ironically, the reason that acts that are “terrifying” do not of the United States: “non-enemy combatants” was the term quite satisfy the formal definition of “terrorism” is probably of art. not because of a unique Uyghur disinclination toward politi- The PRC’s netizens have noted resentfully that incidents cally-inspired violence; it is because PRC suppression within of Uyghur-related violence were not the occasion for terror China has been harsh enough, and its regional security initia- victim condolences by the United States, and Western news tives effective enough, that Uyghur violence has not achieved coverage usually contained some reference to what looked the convergence of doctrine, organization, and means suffi- like the extenuating circumstance of PRC oppression in cient to pursue a coherent political strategy through violence Xinjiang. and intimidation i.e. terrorism. Things came to a head with a March 1, 2014 attack on the It is perhaps best to consider the Uyghur dilemma as a de- Kunming railroad station. Ten blade-wielding Uyghur at- colonization struggle, in which the subjugated eventually turn to violence and terror to exhaust, demoralize, and eventually tackers burst into the station, hacked to death 29 people, and evict the colonial power if and when peaceful struggle fails. wounded another 143 before most of them were killed by Unfortunately for advocates of peaceful coexistence, Chinese security forces. perhaps through greater autonomy and respect for Uyghur To the fury of the official PRC media and Chinese national- rights, there is every sign that the PRC has looked at the ists, western outlets coyly used quotation marks around the current widespread sense of grievance, recalled the failure of word “terrorist” (the BBC helpfully explained that the use of liberalization in the 1990s, considered the deficiencies of the the term “terrorist” without attribution should be “avoided”) party and military organizations inside the XUAR: and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing confined itself to characteriz- ing the event as a “terrible and senseless violent act”. Western …and fast-forwarded to the anti-terrorism end-game media further excused its resistance to characterizing the by imposing a worst-case, highly intrusive security Grand Guignol scene at the railroad station as terrorism regime that will maximize the Han demographic because of historical concerns that the PRC hyped and mis- advantage, make significant investments in the local 21 police and military forces and expansion of the surveil- Uyghur people and an interlocutor with the CCP—and by lance network, and aggressively co-opt or neutralize reaching out to like-minded Han and Tibetan activists, and by Uyghur resistance, all without considering political seeking to nurture a group of Uyghur students with a similar compromise. outlook--Ilham was trying to occupy a space the Party wishes to keep void. And the service he was offering—the prospect In other words, the window for Uyghur political agency of reconciliation and peaceful coexistence—was perhaps an and principled resistance under the current regime by peace- objective that the PRC felt was no longer attainable or was ful means, if not completely shut, has closed to a narrow gap. unimportant to China and its vision of defying Uyghur anger What’s left may look a lot like terrorism. and spasmodic violence to dominate Xinjiang through Han The Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary, Xi Jinping has designated Xinjiang as a critical issue for the PRC. immigration backed by military force, party control, and eco- In April of 2014 he visited the XUAR in a trip that was lav- nomic supremacy. ishly reported by the state news agencies. If the visit had a A prospect for change—and not change in a good way, message, it was “more of the same”. perhaps—lies more in the PRC’s external relations. Xi started his tour with a visit to the key Xinjiang secu- External interference in Xinjiang affairs—particularly aid rity agencies: the People’s Armed Police, or PAP, which was and comfort to the Uyghurs—has always been a matter of created to handle the domestic unrest portfolio after the PLA great concern to the PRC. performed dismally during the 1989 disturbances in Beijing; There is a diaspora of perhaps half a million Uyghurs in then the PLA garrison; and then the Bingtuan. Xi tried to Turkey, Germany, the United States, and other countries, imbue the troops with revolutionary brio, backhandedly ac- historically a hodgepodge of competing organizations, now knowledging that Xinjiang was an undesirable and unpopu- nominally united as the World Uyghur Congress under lar posting and implying that any thought of restraining or Rebiya Kadeer. moderating the behavior of these troops, with their relatively The PRC has labored mightily to hamstring the overseas fragile discipline and morale, is dicey business. Uyghurs and has largely succeeded for the time being. No In another indication of the relatively precarious health country as yet, wishes to endure China’s wrath by hosting of the party apparatus in Xinjiang, Xi visited a local offi- an explicitly subversive Uyghur presence, and as a result the cial’s family and remarked that 200,000 higher level cadres Uyghur diaspora has renounced the historically evocative were rotated to lower-level organizations in March 2014, a (and ethnically inclusive) agitation for an independent East practice employed when the local cadres are not up to snuff. Turkestan and has limited itself to rather toothless and un- Significantly, a task of the visiting work teams was to promote convincing advocacy of “Uyghur autonomy”. The United “religious harmonization”, in other words attempting to elicit States, for its part, seems to limit itself for the time being to patriotic behavior from the local religious establishment. yanking the PRC’s chain on the Uyghur issue, by welcoming Xi met with Muslim and Buddhist religious leaders and, Uyghur activists to Washington and broadcasting Uyghur rather than making any concessions to Uyghur sensibilities— language news and views into Xinjiang via Radio Free Asia, the concerted CCP campaign to discourage religious obser- reportedly an extremely popular service. vance and, through it, inhibit Uyghur solidarity infuriates Much closer to home, during the years of PRC-USSR hos- many Uyghurs—Xi sent the stern message that the religious tility, and especially when China was lurching from one po- establishment, together with the party and the state, shares re- litical and economic catastrophe to another during the late sponsibility for serving economic construction and ensuring 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union lured tens of thousands of that the XUAR did not slide into chaos. Uyghurs over the border with the promise of a better life, and During his visit, Xi talked up the prospects for economic kept the sword of Soviet-supported Uyghur insurrection over development and prosperity in the midst of the Central Asian Beijing’s head. boom and the PRC’s increasing economic integration with the When the Soviet Union collapsed, the PRC hastened to fix Stans, the so-called “Silk Road Economic Belt”. He also ad- its borders with Kazakhstan, the biggest stan, and also the one dressed a Uyghur sore point, resource exploitation, by touting with the biggest border with China and some of the thorni- 2400 kilometers of pipeline delivering natural gas from the oil est demographics (over 1.7 million Kazakhs inside Xinjiang; fields to four million people in southern Xinjiang. about one quarter million Uyghurs inside Kazakhstan). The The CCP is most happy when the Uyghur community is PRC also invested heavily to become Kazakhstan’s primary atomized, and engages with the state and state controlled in- energy partner. In 1996, the PRC and Kazakhstan cofounded stitutions as individuals on the PRC terms. This appears to be the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China + Russia what the “spirit of ethnic harmony” really means in Xinjiang. + Stans confab whose interests tilt towards security and dis- Therefore, it is perhaps not too surprising that Ilham Tohti, couraging adventurism in the region. the economist and advocate for rights of Uyghurs received A potential fly in the ointment is the possibility of conflict his draconian sentence. By offering to serve as a voice of the between Kazakhstan’s large Russian-speaking minority— 22 about one quarter of the population, primarily in the north of and a strong sense of grievance to the massacre at Islamabad’s the country, a relic of the Soviet era—and the Turkic speaking Lal Masjid mosque in 2007, an event inextricably linked to majority. the PRC. Under a radical cleric, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the In other words, Kazakhstan is another potential Ukraine, mosque had become a radical fiefdom that apparently had no at least in the dreams of the neo cold warriors of the United qualms about affronting the PRC. Mosque students, some of States and Western Europe. There it is avowed that Putin them purportedly Uyghurs, attacked a local massage parlor intends to exploit the purported perils of the Russian- run by Chinese, and there were rumors that plans were afoot speaking population as a pretext to intervene, reconstitute for an outrage that would spoil the 2008 Beijing Olympics. the Soviet Union, seize Kazakhstan’s oil, and fly the Russian After a prolonged crisis, a reluctant President Musharraf flag over the Kazakhstan cosmodrome. It is also quite pos- yielded to Chinese insistence and ordered the storming of the sible that the West and its army of NGOs will seek to cul- mosque by 15,000 troops at a cost of perhaps 1000 lives. tivate distrust and division between the Kazakhs and the Maulana Abdul Aziz not only survived the siege, which ethnic Russians in order to exploit an anticipated succession claimed the life of his brother; he recently emerged from crisis when the current strongman, the seventy four year old prison, apparently freed so he could serve as interlocutor Nursultan Nazarbayev (who has run the country since 1989) between the government and the PTT which, perhaps as a packs it in, and catapult into power a new regime hostile to function of its grudge against the PRC for its role in the Lal Russia. Masjid atrocity, is reported to be harboring some Uyghur In such a case, the PRC would be faced with the rather un- militants. desirable prospect of a pro-Western regime, one with a sizable In recent weeks, Maulana Abdul Aziz as an individual; a population of Uyghurs, bordering on Xinjiang. number of PTT district commanders; and the Uzbek Islamic An even more undesirable prospect might be the emer- Movement have all declared their support for the Islamic State gence of anti-China jihadism in South Asia. caliphate, apparently defying the suzerainty of Mullah Omar, With good reason, the PRC stands accused of ill treatment a mere emir. And, in his July 4, 2014 coming out speech de- of its Uyghur minority. However, jihadi wrath has not been claring the caliphate, Abu Bakar al Baghdadi listed China as a unleashed on China for a number of reasons that go beyond place where “Muslim rights have been forcibly seized” albeit the PRC’s draconian and effective security regime in Xinjiang. in a laundry list of nations including virtually every country First, the PRC’s relationship with the mujahedeen of with a significant Muslim population. Afghanistan and their Pakistani and Saudi patrons runs long The PRC alleges that a trickle of Uyghur fighters have and deep. Supplying the anti-Soviet fighters of Afghanistan already made it to the Middle East to fight for the caliphate. with the mountain of materiel available thanks to Saudi lar- If “AfPak” becomes an IS stomping ground and the PTT gesse was beyond the logistical capabilities of the CIA. The is encouraged to act on its resentment against the PRC, United States turned to the PRC, which was happy to put the Uyghur fighters may find haven, training, and encouragement boot in on the Soviets, and do a quartermaster business that closer to home, and Uyghur militants may start to operate supplied the fighters with four hundred million dollars of ev- inside Xinjiang to chastise the godless infidel persecutors of erything they needed from bullets to mules. Muslims (to recapitulate the framing used against the Soviet The PRC also benefits from close economic relations with Union in Afghanistan). Saudi Arabia (China is now the biggest customer for Saudi Faced with this possibility, the PRC may decide to elevate hydrocarbon products) and Turkey, two countries with the its Xinjiang and regional security measures to an unprec- inclination and means to meddle in Xinjiang, as well as a stra- edented level, perhaps even involving a military intervention tegic alliance with Pakistan, which views Afghan militants as in the PRC’s “near beyond”, coupled with further assaults on its geostrategic asset for force projection. None see profit or Uyghurs dreams of freedom and dignity within the XUAR. advantage in supporting Muslim aspirations inside China, al- In the end, the Uyghurs of Xinjiang may end up with the though solicitude for the Uyghurs (Turkic tribes originated in worst of both worlds—at war and without a nation. cp what’s now the northwestern PRC before finding their way to Istanbul) is a staple of Turkish nationalist politics. edits China Matters and covers Asia for The Afghan Taliban under the command of Mullah Omar Peter Lee CounterPunch. and most other militant actors in the area have for the most part not inflicted murder, kidnapping, and mayhem on the Chinese and their interests in Afghanistan, presumably out of deference to the preferences of Pakistan’s intelligence service and in response to Chinese blandishments. The wild card, however, is the Pakistan Taliban, a.k.a. the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, which owes its existence 23 bigger nut than she already thought. But there before us stood the first me- culture & reviews chanical cotton picker.” Nicholas Lemann writes in The Promised Land about former cotton television, or Internet, no suburbs, uni- pickers who “recently had been barred Monumental versities, or worldwide transportation by law from being out of the house at The Bloody History networks. All of this was made possible night and had no money to spend on of Cotton by the people B.B. King seeks to help entertainment anyway, [now] patroniz- honor: millions of slaves and, after the ing clubs in Chicago that had big bands Civil War, millions of sharecroppers playing inside.” by Lee Ballinger (half of whom were white). Those bands, which took the music Yet the contribution of cotton pickers of the Delta and amplified it and helped In August, bluesman B.B. King goes even further. Right after World it to go in new directions, were indis- became the honorary head of an effort War Two, human cotton pickers were pensable to the creation of rock & to build a national monument in replaced by machines that were fifty roll and many other styles of music. the Mississippi Delta to honor those times more productive. The repressive The musicians themselves were often who picked cotton and made the apparatus that had kept blacks working former cotton pickers as was much of world rich. King, who was born in a on the land against their will suddenly their initial audience. Together they cabin on a cotton plantation outside threw them off it. Where once a man set a sound wave in motion that re- Berclair, Mississippi in 1925, replaces with a gun insisted “You must stay!” verberates still. The spread of this new the late Maya Angelou as the Honorary now a man with a gun insisted “You music began to poke holes in the cotton Chairperson of the Board of Directors must get out!” curtain that walled off the South, not to of the Cotton Pickers of America and Pushed off the land, people flooded mention holes in other forms of apart- the Sharecroppers Interpretive Center. into the cities of the South and the heid across the country, holes that the The plan is for a twenty-five foot high North. Isolated individuals living in best efforts of the worst people have monument to be erected on twenty rural cabins had been easy to control. been unable to plug up. acres of cotton land along Highway 61 Their resistance was often heroic, yet It comes as no surprise that there in the Mississippi Delta. scattered. Masses of people clustered in has been little official support for the At first glance, this project might cities were quite another matter. They Cotton Pickers Monument, despite appear to be simply an overdue gesture were able to create their own organi- the impact of cotton on the world and to hardworking people who have long zations and institutions and move to despite the fact that so many Americans been ignored. While it is certainly that, impose their will. This allowed the civil have family roots in those fields. In it would also serve as a rebuke to the rights and black power movements to 1952, just as countless sharecrop- Confederate monuments that litter the break out and spread. The politics of pers were being shown the door, the South, monuments that make quite a the country were changed forever. Democrats wanted to mend fences with different statement about the people The massive migration out of the Southerners who had bolted the party who picked the cotton. rural South also caused a cultural revo- and run as Dixiecrats in 1948. Adlai But it is so much more. As Karl Marx lution, as the mainly rural music that Stevenson, the quintessential 1950s wrote: “Without slavery there would be had developed under the hammer of liberal, agreed to have segregationist no cotton, without cotton there is no violence and segregation became urban Alabama Senator John Sparkman with modern industry.” It was the combina- music, music that anyone might hear or him on his Presidential ticket. tion of free labor and cheap cotton that be influenced by. As the political twig is bent, so grows made the British textile industry pos- As a recent email from Rock & the tree. The Kennedys traded favors sible and paved the way for the world- Rap Confidential’s Dave Marsh put it: with close personal friends such as wide expansion of the capitalist system. “When the Woody Guthrie show was Mississippi Senator James Eastland. The commercial trade in human flesh at some part of the Smithsonian, maybe It was liberal darlings LBJ and Hubert (cotton pickers/slaves) generated the ten years ago, a friend and I were Humphrey who ensured that the capital that made the financial empires walking towards it when I grabbed her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of the nineteenth century possible. arm and forced a detour onto another with a core of former sharecroppers, The world we live in now is a direct floor. ‘I just want to show you the was not allowed to take its rightful result of the bloody history of cotton. machine that invented rock and roll.’ place at the 1964 Democratic conven- Without the foundation laid by cotton, She looked at me like I was an even tion. today there would be no cell phones,

24 Current liberal darling and pre- them to a White House.” Wynette went Daniel Patrick] Moynihan set up a sumptive 2016 Democratic Presidential on to challenge Clinton to “stand toe to White House task force on ‘Internal nominee Hillary Clinton has offered toe with me” and debate in “any forum,” Migration.’ At Moynihan’s urging, no support for the Cotton Pickers adding “I can assure you, in spite of Nixon said in his 1970 State of the Memorial despite her roots in the your education, you will find me to be Union address, “We must create a new cotton state of Arkansas. That’s because just as bright as yourself.” rural environment which will not only Clinton always takes the side of the Nashville writer Holly Gleason re- stem the migration to urban centers employer, the master. From 1986 to cently told me that Tammy Wynette but reverse it.” 1992, she served on Walmart’s board had her own cotton pickers monument. But instead the “rural environment” and never said a word as the company “She kept a bit of cotton clinging to the has remained desperately poor and

Cotton pickers in Lake Dick, Arkansas. Photograph: Russell Lee, Farm Services Administration. waged a vicious anti-union campaign stem in a little baggie in her dressing the United States has been part of the aimed at keeping the wages of its em- room to always remember working in massive worldwide migration from ployees, many of them the children or that terrible heat as a young woman.” country to city. This has only served grandchildren of sharecroppers, as low Politicians may have ignored the to create bigger, poorer cities. A recent as possible. plight of former sharecroppers but they Harvard/University of Michigan study On January 26, 1992 Hillary Clinton were very worried about the mass mi- found that 1.65 million U.S. households appeared on 60 Minutes to attempt to gration from the South. According to with 3.5 million children are trying to explain away her support of husband/ Nicholas Lemann: “For several years subsist on less than two dollars per Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, it had occurred to government offi- person per day (the official poverty who was under fire for marital infi- cials that the crisis in the ghettos might line is at $17 per person per day). This delity. “I’m not sitting here like some be solved by finding a way to keep extreme poverty echoes the extreme little woman standing by my man like rural Southern blacks from moving poverty of those who once picked Tammy Wynette,” Hillary said. to the cities. Toward the end of his cotton. In both cases, people were Wynette, a former cotton picker who presidency, Johnson set up a secret pushed outside the economy when they went on to become a country singing Interagency Task Force on Rural-Urban were replaced by new technology. star, responded: “You have offended Migration to look into this question, Just as half of all sharecroppers were every person who has no one to take and in 1969 [Nixon advisor, Democrat white, so too are half of the heads of 25 the poor households now living on two up filming another by becoming inti- and UN operations in Iraq. Her camera dollars a person per day. This creates mately connected to accidental pro- follows the family, the military, and an environment where the music the tagonists who were never scripted to general Iraqi citizens and gives a view sharecroppers invented can, in its be in the films. She is a woman roving of the religious sect- and war-torn oc- current evolutions, become a unify- with a camera letting narratives unfold. cupied landscape and a family trying ing force. That potential was indicated Through this method, she shows the to get by in it. Poitras focuses on the by Jay-Z in a recent interview when he growing power of the U.S. government doctor and his family, but she also de- said: “This generation right now, they... to control privacy, movement, and so- livers objective documentation of the are a bit removed from those racist called liberty. “election process.” Televisions provide feelings because…it’s integrated and Poitras practices cinéma-vérité, news feeds of the dangerous politically the music we listen to is the same.” He where the camera and filmmaker charged environment (e.g. bombings added: “All our feelings and anxieties become invisible. There are no talking in Fallujah) while the family responds, and all that thing are more similar now.” heads to explain or proselytize. Poitras goes about its life, and votes. At times, A monument to cotton pickers would does not know the outcome of her the camera pulls back to stunning be more than recognition of their blood, films in advance. She starts with a vistas of the Iraq landscape. U.S. mili- sweat, and tears. It would be more than general idea, but chance becomes the tary tanks cruise the streets, but Poitras an expression of gratitude for all they key player and makes the documenta- never talks about the occupation. She have given us. It would serve as a re- ries much more real, immediate and just shows its continuous presence. minder that in times of epochal change, open-ended. The Oath follows Osama bin Laden’s great things can be accomplished by In an interview in The New Yorker, former bodyguard Abu Jandal, who is those who are cast aside by the onrush Poitras explains: “Plot is so relentless. now a taxi driver in Yemen. Initially of technology. cp It’s totally unforgiving, and it also can Poitras planned to focus on Jandal’s be simplifying. It can provide resolu- brother-in-law Salim Ahmed Hamdan Lee Ballinger is an associate editor at tion where there should be none. It who had been in solitary confine- Rock & Rap Confidential. Free email can provide false catharsis.” Poitras ment at Guantanamo for being a driver subscriptions are available by writing does not give simplistic explanations. for Al Qaeda. It turns out that Jandal [email protected]. Rather she lets the camera show us an turned Salim into authorities. He went environment and the people in it. In free while Salim was imprisoned. So this way, her films have more politi- Poitras’s focus changed to Jandal with cal impact than Talking Heads docu- Salim maintaining an invisible but Laura Poitras’s mentaries with their clear agendas and powerful presence. Poitras installed Surveillance Trilogy barrage of “experts” telling us what a movie camera in Jandal’s taxi. Abu to think. Poitras allows the audience drives through busy streets, picking up to think on its own terms. Her films passengers who inquire about his politi- Under Western provide questions, rather than answers, cal and religious views. Abu talks about Eyes and questions lead to thought which Jihad, Islam, and the U.S. occupation. leads to action. We learn of his religious and political My Country, My Country (2006) views as well as the overall climate. At By Kim Nicolini focuses on the U.S. occupation of Iraq one point, a passenger asks Abu about and the Iraqi elections. While filming the camera, and he lies, stating the in Iraq, Poitras met Dr. Riyad who was camera is broken. Interestingly, Poitras’s Documentary filmmaker Laura running for office. Poitras moved in taxi camera is a surveillance device Poitras just released the third film in with Riyadh’s family, and through her within her film on surveillance. her Surveillance Trilogy the Post 9-11 camera, we are given intimate access Potrias’s camera takes up residence and post-Patriot Act world climate. to their response to the election and in Abu’s home, and we watch Jandal in- Citizenfour (2014) covers Edward the overall Iraqi environment. U.S. air- doctrinate his son as well as other young Snowden’s disclosure of Top Secret NSA strikes, car bombs and other war zone men about Islam and Jihad. Through his documents revealing that the United explosions provide the soundtrack. actions, we understand he is still an ex- States government has been spying on Poitras follows Riyadh to Abu tremist. True to Poitras’s style, the docu- its own citizens and people around the Ghraib where he interviews prison- mentary fluctuates between intimate globe via telecommunications, comput- ers behind the fence. Poitras also films claustrophobic footage in Abu’s apart- ers, search engines, mobile phones, and other government sites, such as U.S. ment and scenes of the landscape, mili- social media. In all three films, Poitras checkpoints, military training rooms, tary trials and interviews, and stunning started filming one thing, but ended 26 sequences of the Guantanamo complex. The crux of the film resides in the part of the documentary is the empty Poitras’s process allows for a democrat- hour of footage from inside Snowden’s space after the credits roll. We leave the ic view of humans. While Abu wakes Hong Kong hotel room as he divulges theater and understand that the United his son to pray at dawn and talks about his NSA secrets. The room is full of States continues to violate human rights how the afterlife matters, not the mate- tension. Snowden talks, rubs his chin, to privacy. In one sequence, computer rial world, I couldn’t help but think of answers phones, and shows images hacker Jacob Applebaum notes the Post America’s Religious Right which pretty on a laptop screen, but he remains 9-11 conflation of privacy and freedom. much holds the same views as Islam ex- an enigma. While the information Freedom is now seen in terms of tremists. Snowden provides is obviously true, privacy, so when we are denied privacy, The film includes a 1998 interview his motivations seem vague. He states we are denied freedom. In those terms, with Osama bin Laden, in which Abu one thing, but perhaps feels another. the United States is no longer a “free” stands at bin Laden’s side, and a 60 This ambiguity is implied in the nega- country (if it ever was). Minute interview with Jandal where tive space of the film. A hotel fire Poitras herself became the object of Abu talks about why he left Al Qaeda. alarm keeps going off instilling a sense surveillance after making her first two This material poses more questions. films. She has been detained over forty Why is Jandal free and Salim impris- times by the U.S. government. She now oned? And why is Jandal still alive? lives in exile, working in Berlin in an These questions come to mind without attempt to protect her material, her Poitras directly putting them there. “Poitras herself privacy, and her freedom. Snowden Citizenfour further addresses being became the object continues to live in exile in Russia. an informant. Edward Snowden con- After watching the trilogy, I couldn’t tacted Poitras as the point person to of surveillance: help but think of Poitras as a tool whom he would divulge his knowledge of surveillance. In one scene in The of NSA’s domestic surveillance prac- she has been Oath, Abu implores the camera (a.k.a. tices. Poitras was already shooting her Poitras) to delete material from the third film when Snowden contacted detained over forty previous day when he talks about her. She had shot hours of footage, in- times by the U .S . 9-11. Since we witness the material on cluding NSA whistleblower William screen, clearly Poitras did not honor his Binney and WikiLeaks co-founder government ”. plea. Evidence of his words is stored in Julian Assange. In the middle of her the mind of everyone who watches the project, Snowden contacted Poitras documentary and in Potrias’s own data under the fictitious name Citizenfour. of paranoia. The phone rings, and archive. At this point, Potrias’s initial project Snowden unplugs it realizing it could Documentaries carry the illusion of became derailed and redirected. Her be a surveillance device. Even the walls truth by way of genre. They are con- previous random encounters in film- seem to be listening. structions assembled with the very making were taken to a new level as her Scenes in the hotel cut to news re- specific intentions of the filmmaker. At personal implication in the Snowden leases of the Snowden leaks. THE the end of Citizenfour, Greenwald and case threw a wrench in her cinéma- US GOVERNMENT IS SPYING ON Snowden exchange written messages vérité practice. How could she be invis- EVERYDAY CITIZENS AND THE about Obama’s role in drone bombings. ible when she was such an integral part WORLD! And let’s not forget that The scene feels awkward and staged. of the story? What was she going to OBAMA IS PRESIDENT while this is Perhaps it was Potrias’s way of putting do with the hours of previously filmed happening. Hope, my ass. distance between herself and her film, footage? The most chilling scenes are stun- or maybe it is a way of saying docu- The result is a little awkward. Some ning landscape shots. Images of the mentaries are also not to be entirely old footage is tacked onto the begin- State Apparatus are ominous and eerily trusted. They are constructions, and no ning of the documentary. Binney beautiful. Shots of a data mining site construction is pure truth. cp makes appearances, but Assange did being built in Utah, giant radar dishes not want to be part of the film. Poitras on the UK coast, and another data Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cul- remains at a distance by reading mining site in Germany require no tural critic living in Tucson, Arizona. Snowden’s emails in voiceover, showing words to deliver the implications they the initial encrypted correspondence, represent. and including typed conversations The film instills the audience with between the two. paranoia. Perhaps the most effective

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