Gaza = Ukraine = Syria = Libya = Iraq = Afghanistan = Yugoslavia

In a talk from May of '99, Dr. Michael Parenti explains all.

In Love with Night

Joanne Laurier of WSWS on They Live by Night (1948) and the ever-needed greatness of Nicholas Ray.

When You're Smiling

Wizard

The Wizard of Oswald (2013) is Jack Robertson's very funny and very deep reading of almost everything Dallas 1963 -- all done at his computer, showing the complete uselessness of 21st Century police agencies. Robertson's conclusions are a bit jejune and accepting, but Jack the Wizard makes everything so much fun and detailed you won't care at all. . .

The Ivy Intifada

 Musa al-Gharb:

A sense of unreality has pervaded the protests, the counterprotests, and the discourse about them. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Irsa Hirsi, was arrested during the first Columbia University crackdown against student encampments, alongside the children of millionaires and billionaires and other well-connected individuals. In addition, Hirsi was suspended from Columbia and, by virtue of not being allowed on campus, was temporarily evicted from her university housing and denied access to university dining halls. Reporting on these events, The Daily Beast declared: “When Isra Hirsi joined several of her Barnard College and Columbia University peers in the pro-Palestinian campus protest known as the Gaza encampment, she had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days.” In a context where actual homeless people wander the street outside of Columbia’s gates begging for food, it takes a special type of cluelessness to describe the daughter of a sitting member of Congress as facing homelessness and food insecurity for what is, at best, an inconvenience.

In subsequent protests, demonstrators put up signs declaring the encampment a “people’s university for Palestine.” This was an audacious claim for students attending a gated school that is protected by private security, entry to which requires an active Columbia-issued identification card. The university admits a miniscule share of applicants and costs, on paper, nearly $90,000 per year to attend. The students taking part in the protests are attending Columbia University (instead of, say, their local land-grant university) largely because they personally desire to be more elite than other college graduates. Many of them arrived as elites; most who didn’t will leave as such. Again, the core purpose of institutions like Columbia is to identify, cultivate, and legitimize elites. To describe it as a “people’s university” in any sense is to obscure the functions it actually serves and why the demonstrators are there to begin with.

Even more strikingly, during the occupation of Hamilton Hall, a spokeswoman from the protesters compared the occupiers’ plight to that of the people of Gaza, complaining that the students were facing “starvation” and “dehydration” and demanding that the university allow “humanitarian aid.” Left out of her comments was the reality that, unlike the people of Gaza, she could leave at any time. And upon departing, she could buy all the food she wanted: She is the daughter of wealthy and prominent professionals who own an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

It’s easy to see how these demonstrators could be confused, however, because their opposition often validated and reinforced the sense that they were genuinely dangerous people engaged in truly radical action.

For example, many called for a suppression of the protests on the grounds that they made many Jewish students feel “unsafe.” Unsafe from whom? As Sohrab Ahmari reported on the protests, “keffiyehs abounded, sometimes jarringly matched with midriff tops; young women seemed to dramatically outnumber the men.” The participants, he emphasized, were “too wedded to the logics of the corporate, safetyist society against which they rebel to pose any serious challenge to it.” These are, again, students who relentlessly made sure they checked all the right boxes and pleased all the right authorities to get into an Ivy League school. These are kids who weren’t even willing to show their faces while they engaged in nonviolent protest to avoid risking their Goldman Sachs jobs or legislative internships. These aren’t students who are likely to engage in murders or assaults. Indeed, even people who were suspended for using genuinely violent rhetoric were not intimidating, to put it mildly, and were not likely to live their words in this case any more than they do for any of the other radical rhetoric they espouse (while building their elite careers and credentials).

Statistically, there were a total of four on-campus aggravated assaults, four weapons violations, and 15 nonviolent bias incidents over the last three years on record (2020-2022), looking at all five Columbia University sites in New York City combined. There were no murder or manslaughter incidents committed by students, nor were there any violent hate crimes perpetrated on any campus site. Almost all violent incidents that Columbia students experience involve random New Yorkers outside the university’s gates. The idea that Columbia students pose a severe physical danger to their peers is empirically absurd. In fact, there was little violence at any of the protests at Columbia or nationwide over the past month—and the violence that did occur was almost uniformly against the protesters, at the hands of the authorities and, at UCLA, pro-Israel mobs.

Contrary to the claims advanced at congressional hearings, elite universities aren’t hotbeds of anti-Semitism that indoctrinate young people into hating Israel and Jews. Highly educated liberals are among the least likely constituents in America to hold anti-Semitic views or to engage in anti-Semitic behaviors, and higher education is empirically associated with greater support for Israel, not less.

Pesky facts like these, however, didn’t stop former CNN anchor and Meta executive Campbell Brown from claiming that her children would be safer in Tel Aviv than on the Upper West Side. For those unfamiliar, Brown is the daughter of disgraced Louisiana senator and secretary of state James H. Brown. She is married to Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and foreign-policy adviser to Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential campaign. The idea that Brown’s and Senor’s affluent children face serious danger from students at an Ivy League school in Manhattan—to the point that they would be better off relocating to a Middle Eastern nation currently at war—is transparently absurd.

Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai has likewise gone viral by declaring repeatedly that he feels “unsafe” on campus, all the while describing student demonstrators as terrorists and “kapos” (Jews who collaborated with the Nazis). On April 21, Davidai sent an email to university leadership and many journalists, declaring his intention to confront the protesters in the encampment alongside other pro-Israel supporters and to rely on the university’s private security for protection. The university replied by informing him that he and his confederates would be provided space for a counterprotest on another lawn, and would be provided security to protect them, per his request. Davidai responded that he wasn’t interested in a counterprotest: He wanted to crash the existing protest. And he vowed to sue the university if it didn’t protect him as he tried to initiate this conflict.

The next morning, he showed up with a small throng of supporters, an Israeli flag draped around his shoulders, only to find his access to the campus revoked. He immediately compared being unable to stoke a confrontation with the protection of campus security to the situation faced by Jewish intellectuals in Nazi Germany.

Davidai himself is the son of a multimillionaire tied to weapons manufacturing and the grandson of a deputy CEO of the Israeli airline El Al. When he stomps and yells like a spoiled child, while pretending to be the only thing standing between terrorists and Nazis carrying out pogroms on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, this is no less ridiculous than Ivy League kids cosplaying as leftist revolutionaries.

In truth, there is very little at stake on any side of the struggles at Columbia University, and ultimately, everyone will be just fine. Sooner or later, most of the students will proceed to their well-remunerated jobs—protesters, counter-protesters, and neutral parties alike. Whether Shafik manages to hold on at Columbia or ultimately gets pushed out, she will spend the rest of her days filthy rich. Likewise, even in the unlikely event that Davadai is terminated for his many indiscretions, he already has a promising second career lined up as a right-aligned influencer. Columbia, too, will fare well. The school is older than America, and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. All those people vowing not to send their kids to the Ivies are lying to others and possibly themselves (or perhaps their offspring were unlikely to gain admission in the first place).

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed that “behind every image, something has disappeared.” The Ivy League Intifada is no exception. The only people in this story who face genuine suffering have been almost completely absent from “the discourse” over the last several weeks: namely, the people of Gaza.

While Americans obsess over tents on the Columbia quad, hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sleeping in tents in Rafah. They are not “unsheltered” because the university revoked their access to the campus, but because their homes and communities were leveled by a campaign of destruction with few analogs in modern history. And even their tents are being bombed.

It isn’t even possible in theory for Gazans to carry out campus demonstrations, because every single university in Gaza has been destroyed by Israel. Instead of dealing with the inconvenience of being unable to access the dining hall or hang out on the quad—and rather than stressing out over whether they’ll land their dream job or if others are saying mean things about them (that make them feel emotionally “unsafe”—the people of Gaza are witnessing their loved ones killed in front of their eyes, are undergoing amputations without anesthesia, and literally starving to death. There is nowhere left for them to flee, but a ground invasion seems imminent despite Hamas ostensibly agreeing to a ceasefire.

It is obvious why Biden, House Republicans, and others determined to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s war would rather talk about student protesters instead of the fate of Gaza. Mainstream media outlets, meanwhile, recognize that campus culture-war stories get far more clicks and are far easier to produce than responsible reporting on bleak international events.

For their part, the student activists seem to genuinely want to raise awareness about the plight of Gazans—albeit ideally in a way that enhances their own clout. In a recent editorial for The Guardian, leaders of the Columbia protest movement urged everyone to listen to their perspectives, and elevate their voices, so they might raise the salience of the crisis in Gaza. The actual conflict they are ostensibly trying to end received only a single oblique mention in the last sentence of the piece. The rest of the article was focused on the struggles Columbia students have faced and calls for them to get still more attention relative to other stakeholders. In truth, Columbia students don’t need your attention. They don’t need your support. They don’t need your solidarity.

Attention is finite. Energy is finite. Time is finite. Resources are finite. Save your concern and your efforts for the crisis in Gaza. Don’t let the farce at Columbia obscure the tragedy that the protests were supposed to call attention to in the first place. 

All of this monumental piece.

Heart of Glass

"God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through."
- Paul Valery

Upon its release, Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris embraced it as "the only truly great American movie of the 1970s" (surely the last era with any greatness within US film) and later listed it as one of the ten greatest movies ever made. (This was actually defended a few years ago by a fellow VV chucklehead.) Pauline Kael dismissed it as "mere out-takes from Annie Hall." And there were reports of New Yorkers -- still smarting from the slings and arrows of the "Ford to City: Drop Dead" era -- standing and cheering its opening montage.

What were these people, Kael aside, looking at? Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) is about the most despicable and hard to sit through movie I can think of, an Advertisements for Myself told by an idiot signifying nothing, intriguing only for the sad, smug, and smarmy future it pointed us toward: the death of New York City and its takeover by the Mutant Elite. NOT -- as its creator mind-bogglingly once suggested in an interview -- via a Death in Venice sort of prescience, but by embodying so much of the coming shit-storm: class apartheid, the creation of an ever-thickening bell jar protecting the culture class (and the culture business) from the obviousness of its mediocrity and irrelevance, Art as Therapy, the Poseur Wad (Zagats, Time Out, Yelp, and the NYT "Arts and Leisure" section), and the final tragedy: a New York City with no root to the past and no suggestion of the future; a city that celebrates our loss: that we're left with less and less sense of the lives of the men and women who came before us.

And wouldn't that continue to be the case with Woody Allen? For over fifty years in control of a directorial freedom unmatched in US movie history (or perhaps a good example of a dog not knowing it's chained because it never wanders very far from the peg), Allen has completed over 50(!) feature films, without for one moment engaging:

-- the Ed Koch/Ronald Reagan 80s

-- the people's city under Mayor David Dinkens, so perfectly captured in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant

-- the Seinfeld/Clinton/Giuliani miasma

-- post 9/11

-- the wholly financialized Prison Island

-- the current COVID/post-COVID horror show

Nothing. Not a damned moment. Yet, perhaps Allen is an ivory-tower artist, someone dealing with Great Themes and Eternal Truths. . . So what are the suffocating 92 minutes of Manhattan truly about?

The story: middle-aged TV writer Isaac Davis -- with book contract as back-up -- quits his SNL-type job out of creative and spiritual pique, while dating 17-year-old Dalton student Mariel Hemingway. His best friend "Yale" -- God, what a snob wannabe Allen is -- is having an affair with the nails-across-the-blackboard Diane Keaton, whom Yale eventually dumps out of marital guilt, leaving her to desperately glom onto Isaac, causing Davis to dump Tracy-the-teenager, supposedly out of boredom. Yale has second thoughts, leaves his wife to live with Keaton, who dumps Isaac, causing Isaac to re-evaluate Tracy's blank face, along with Mozart's "Jupiter Symphony," Swedish movies (at one point we're forced to watch Allen leave a revival house shaking his head over Inagaki and Dovzhenko!), Louis Armstrong, and the crabs at Sam Wo's. Isaac rushes madly to his now-revealed True Love, only to learn it's too late: the teenager is off to London. Cue the Gershwin.

Bad enough, but made even worse by Gordon Willis's entombed imagery, InstantArt©. (Much as the Gershwin provides InstantLonging© -- imagine this flick with the music turned off.) (And while we're at it, let's add Gordo to our own Academy of the Overrated, along with Allen, Keaton, and Andrew Sarris.)

Again, what is the movie about? That Woody Allen is:

A sexual genius

Not a homunculus

The smartest, realist, and most moral guy on the planet

And most empathically not:

a short, ugly, self-righteous middle-brow

How the movie appropriates -- beyond the Gershwin and the Black-and-White -- to no use at all: the lovely park at the end of East 57th Street, the sadly gone original Russian Tea Room, the sadly not-gone Bloomingdale's, F.A.O. Schwarz, the Hayden Planetarium, hansom cab rides at night. While spitting out Catholics, pigeons, Lee Harvey Oswald, destructive working-class moving-men, Porsche owners, Virginia Woolf, African diplomats, and poor kids in Bolivia. And what is this little kid Willie (as-in-Mays) doing in the movie, other than being a prop-ad for Woody-as-great-Central Park athlete/father? And why are we constantly looking at blank apartment walls and corners while characters chatter off-screen?

In this retardo version of Death in Venice, what are we told are the evils of dying '79 Manhattan, on the cusp of Reaganism? (The only "politics" in the movie is an ERA event at MOMA and Isaac wanting to punch out some New Jersey Nazis.) The planned destruction of unions and New York's working class? The beginnings of what would become city-wide gentrification? The takeover of city culture by the Knowing? The deals cut to save the city from bankruptcy -- deals that would lead to its current totalitarian financialization? No. Instead: loud music, drugs, street crime and garbage, bad TV, pizzas with too many toppings, and "people taking the easy way out." (Funny how Allen chooses to dump on TV sketch comedy during its Golden Age: the Belushi/Radner/Aykroyd SNL, Carol Burnett, and the best: SCTV.) The few laughs the movie retains are of that unintentional and reflexive sort: "Talent is luck. The most important thing in life is courage"; "Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind"; "I'm going to be hanging in a classroom one day and when I thin out I want to be sure that I'm well thought of"; and of course "It's worse than not insightful -- it's not funny."

While Allen was whining about people's brain cells being destroyed by TV gamma-rays:



Manhattan still has its many worshippers. (Let's throw J. Hoberman into the Overrated Academy as well.) It's defended as Allen sending himself up and his living-above-the-city clan. It is also, astonishingly, placed in the "Love is All" class of masterpieces such as Day of Wrath, Ambersons, Madame de, Sunrise, Vertigo, Ugetsu, Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, Masquerade, Dolls, Some Came Running, Europa '51.

Where? Where is any of this? (Gershwin is Gershwin. The movie is the movie.) Isaac Davis neurotically runs to Tracy at the end because he's been dumped. Amor Omnia becoming Ego Omnia. And the sending up? Well, there are those 30 seconds on the Southampton dock as Isaac listens to some ex-wife criticisms of him being read off-screen. Come to think of it , who would buy a book filled with "marital revelations" concerning a dime-a-dozen ex-SNL writer, to the point where an entire bookstore window is filled with copies?

In a way, the movie is tonic. For those of us who would love to take a machine gun to Manhattan's current taste-making vampire class -- the dumbest in our history -- but instead pine for the past, Manhattan reminds us: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Now, if we can push it back another 20 years. . .



What a gas!

Now for the root canal.

The United States of Amalek

Never Saw It Coming

Even the greatest of television shows give us too much information ~ sound and visual; and certainly story. Strange, considering we don't require background for most characters going in. The locations are familiar to us. So is what might be called the "moral architecture" of the show: we grasp in terms of style and meaning where it will go, and where it will not go. The best episodes in the best series, usually by miracle, seem to contain these presumptions almost as distraction, using them to deepen and complicate the mysteries already at the heart of the matter.

For the first 20 minutes of its 48-minute length, "Counter Gambit" (an episode of The Rockford Files from the middle of its initial season) gives us nothing but false information. Two ex-cons with sudden new freedom hire private investigator (and ex-con) Jim Rockford to find a missing girl and her $250,000 of missing pearls. They expect Rockford to locate the girl, soften her up, get the lay of her apartment, then grab the loot. The only question seems to be whether the P.I. will return honor among thieves, or turn the necklace over to the police. . .

Not exactly. The story begins way past middle and only after wrap-up can we understand what's really happened. "Counter Gambit" -- originally premiering for NBC on January 24, 1975, written by Howard Berk and Juanita Bartlett, directed by the fine actor Jackie Cooper -- is one of the great con episodes in television history. Secretly dense and complicated, it feels like it was set up by the Rockford crew in about six seconds, the story was shot out of the trees, and no one saw it coming. It is perfect.

So many nice turns. Ford Raines as Manny Tolan. The wonderful Noah Berry Jr. twice briefly. M. Emmet Walsh as a particularly sweaty "insurance investigator." Garner throughout. Mary Frann luscious and seven years away from becoming Newhart's Joanna Loudon. And Stuart Margolin's first meaningful appearance as Angel Martin. (Margolin had directed a previous Rockford episode.) Not yet the corrupt and sniveling Angel we all love, "Counter Gambit"'s Angel is endearing and smart. (The scene inside the 1970s porn house is one of the funniest in the series.)

And Eddie Fontaine steals it as Moss Williams.

George and Scott, Max and the Judge

Fuck Israel

 

Fuck Zionism

 

Fuck Hollywood

 

And Fuck Every Virtue-Signaling Twitter Cuck

 

"From the River to the Sea!"