(Thoughts on President George W. Bush. Address at Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. 24 May 2004, and the film Capturing the Friedmans by Andrew Jarecki.)
Como vuelan los dias.
It was coincidence that I watched the film Capturing the Friedmans in the evening, and listened to President George W. Bush give an address later the same night. But sitting dumfounded after the address ended, with both the film and the speech molesting my foggy head, I began to see connections and odd similarities in the circumstances behind the speech and the film.
To begin with, they both addressed abuse and sodomy without actually depicting it. Reality was not in front of us, rather, it was suggested by third parties (Bush and the Friedmans). Bush's speech and Jarecki's film cloaked fiction and fact in layers of symbolic images and conjectural situations. Even if the Friedman story is real, the film is presented as a film, thus as a fine art. The speech was intended to be reality but ended up also sounding like fine art. So, both of them began in fact, worked with fiction, and in the end melted into an exciting and dubious entertainment.
The Abu Ghraib prison tortures have highlighted the moral standards we have learned through our own media. President Bush, true to form, does not mention torture by name. (Although he stumbled over the name of the prison in a funny freudian slip.) Instead, he gives us symbols and suggestions we can all agree with. Torture is wrong, the sick few who did it will pay, etc. While we are listening to President Bush, we say to ourselves: Yea! Torture is bad! I dont support torture! (But American prisons are not summer camps.) Likewise in Capturing the Friedmans, the media and police manipulate a delicate and ugly situation in the Friedman family, and all pretenses of a stern but honest legal justice system looking calmly at the facts blows up into simplified propaganda. The police wanted to find a massive crime, and the community was willing to accept it as fact.
We seem to need a nuclear tossing madman as much as we need a mass sodomizing computer teacher. Legislation and steroid inflated defense budgets are in place precisely because of Mr. Hussein and Mr. Friedman: the villain heads. What is not addressed, as usual, is how individuals like these are nurtured and formed with care by the same system. We are simply incapable of handling pedophiles and mini tyrants with the very humanistic ideals we claim to represent.
If Mr. Friedman had received real, logical, effective therapy, he would not have been a school teacher giving private computer classes: a mentally ill person with constant access to the objects of his illness. Instead, the one time he asked for help, the psychologist said "you have it under control". Although he probably did not commit the hundreds of abuses he was accused of, he clearly was not "under control".
But that is only the top layer.
As works of art detached from life, both the film and the speech are strong, dubious, and exhilarating.
There were many elements of manipulation in the editing of Capturing the Friedmans. Mr. Jarecki's smooth, professional mix of raw home video footage, news clips, music, recently shot interviews, and poetic shots (such as dead leaves blowing through the Friedman yard) crowds objectivity with conflicting signals. The filmmaker knew how to arouse our emotions in a manipulative cinematic narrative. However, the content of these videos is so charged with human struggle, that they speak for themselves. But still, reality is removed: events occur on a screen. A documentary may be based on fact but reality does not live on a screen. We are removed by time and place from the people, who are now reduced to flat characters in a film. The power of Jarecki's assembling is almost physical, but not actually physical, not quite.
President Bush's speech is a piece of very convincing performance art. He appears less like a flesh and blood president dealing with reality, than an actor presenting hypothetical scenarios for our imagination. The facts are unclear, in direct opposition to his clear, simple words. He says firmly, with a down home accent, that the "coalition" has no interest in occupying Iraq, and that democratic "elections" will soon be realized. These two statements alone are so far from reality they become convincing and entertaining. President Bush's art is how he draws you into his world view like a fortune teller, we hear what we all want to hear without the burden of specificity. He is committed to "a free and stable and peaceful Iraq", and so is everyone. We are convinced and moved by an exciting mass illusion, much larger than the equally fictitious Lord of the Rings series.
"There is nothing for us but resistance." Says on anonymous Iraqi via NPR. This statement sums up the fiction of Bush's remarks, and charges the situation to a perilous polarization. Coldly speaking, the ancient struggle of good vs. evil appeals to our developed (twisted) sense of entertainment. Both sides streamline complexity and we are incapable of seeing ourselves in the "enemy". This condition is as dangerous as it is exciting. President Bush stoked the fire skillfully. In news sources worldwide, we hear of "Rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, also known as "Outlaw cleric Moktada al-Sadr". Even the "liberal" press such as the New York Times and NPR's morning edition use these cartoon images. An "outlaw cleric"?! Exactly which law is he "out" from? What colorful, beautiful, wonderful language! Images such as these are inspired directly from the nations poet laureate: George W. Bush.
In both Jarecki's film and President Bush's address, true and false drift in and out of each other. So as viewers, we are left with what was presented directly before our eyes: human illness and suffering so raw it almost made me puke. Lies and inconsistencies pile high on each side, leaving us with the only truth we cannot deny: people are suffering and dying. There are many people suffering and dying, right now, today, and our society is not capable of remedy or prevention. But, we appreciate its entertainment value: we crave it. And we may even identify it for what it is: high art.
A. Bergman